Instagram is probably bigger than YouTubeIn the same week that Alphabet drew back a curtain on YouTube’s money machine, we also now have a better sense of how big Facebook’s Instagram subsidiary is — and it’s even larger. Instagram collected about $20 billion in ad revenue last year, Sarah Frier and Nico Grant of Bloomberg report, citing unnamed sources. That’s more than a quarter of all of Facebook’s sales last year — and a sea change from 2012, the year that Facebook bought Instagram, when the service had no ads. YouTube’s reported ad revenue was $15.2 billion last year. And that’s a “gross revenue” figure including money meant to be shared with the service’s content creators.

Source: New York Times February 05, 2020 11:39 UTC