How Instagram Became Meta's Golden Goose

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Like millions of French people, you are probably a fan of the Instagram network. Founded in 2010, this photo-sharing platform quickly caught the eye of Facebook (in 2012), and today claims more than a billion users worldwide. And when the app doesn't suffer a huge outage like it did recently, it should allow Meta to represent more than half of its advertising revenue in 2025 (in the United States).

Instagram could soon represent half of Meta's advertising revenue in the United States

Indeed, according to the research firm Emarketer, the monetization of the Instagram platform, whose Reels format rivals TikTok and YouTube Shorts, has seen optimization and meteoric growth. And for good reason, Instagram users now spend nearly two-thirds of their time watching videos, particularly through the Reels section, which encourages (almost) endless scrolling. The Stories section, also very popular, is also not stingy when it comes to ads.

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Also, if in 2022, Instagram was at the origin of nearly 30% of Meta's global activity, in 2025, Instagram could generate no less than $32 billion in advertising revenue, an increase of almost 25%. This would put Instagram at the top of the most profitable applications of the giant Meta, also in control of Facebook or WhatsApp.

In 2024, Instagram's ad revenue came primarily from its Feed and Stories features, which contributed 53.7% and 24.6%, respectively. How much this will change in 2025 remains to be seen, but with video formats proving increasingly addictive, and advertising that is also very (sometimes frankly too) aggressive, there is no doubt that Meta should explode the counters next year.

Furthermore, if a TikTok ban were to take effect in the US, Reels and other YouTube Shorts could become increasingly attractive alternatives for advertisers, and Instagram could see its revenue explode again. “If the TikTok ban is enforced in 2025, Instagram could capture more than a fifth of the ad dollars reallocated to TikTok in the U.S.” says Jasmine Enberg for ’Emarketer.

Let us also recall that thanks to the use of AI to recommend content, Facebook and Instagram have managed to increase the time that users spend on these platforms. In other words, if you feel like you're spending more and more time (doing nothing) on ​​Facebook and Instagram, that's “normal”.

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