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Instagram is becoming a bigger part of advertisers' marketing plans, so advertisers are spending more of their budgets on Instagram. Instagram's ad revenue grew 177 percent in the second quarter of 2018 and its ad impressions increased 209 percent, according to CRM, the largest U.S. consulting firm. Facebook's ad revenue rose just 40 percent over the same period. In other words, Instagram's ad growth is more than four times that of Facebook.

A Survey conducted in February 2018 by Actate, an opinion leader marketing agency, found that 88.9 percent of opinion leaders worldwide said they had more opinion leadership campaigns on Instagram than a year ago. In addition to posts on Feed, Instagram Stories is the most commonly used sponsored ad.

India is one example of how Instagram is getting more and more attention from marketers as platform users grow strongly. According to eMarketer, the number of Instagram users in India grew by 123% in 2017, the fastest growing in the world. According to a December 2017 survey by Buzzoka, an opinion leader marketing agency, 78 percent of Indian opinion leaders see Instagram as an important platform for opinion leader marketing this year.

Overall, eMarketer expects the number of Instagram users worldwide to grow by 18.4% in 2018, reaching 714.4 million. Sweden has the highest instagram user penetration, accounting for 68.9 per cent of social network users, followed by Indonesia (62.8 per cent) and Norway (57.7 per cent).

There is no denying that the power balance between Facebook and Instagram is changing. When Facebook bought Instagram, the latter had 1 billion users, more than the former. Instagram is valued at more than $100 billion, according to a recent analysis by Industry Research. Instagram continues to grow among its younger user base, which is critical to Facebook's growth.

And, tired of the political wrangling and privacy scandals that have plagued Facebook, Facebook users have chosen to flee and flock to Instagram's photo and video apps. In June, users spent an average of 53 minutes a day on Instagram, just five minutes less than Facebook users, according to Android Platform, an analytics firm. With user base growth slowing, Facebook's future with Instagram is more uncertain than none.

"If we weren't bullish on Instagram, we wouldn't be so confident about Facebook's future," said Rick A. BTIG, an analyst at investment bank BTIG. "They've done a really good job of supporting each other, " says Rich Greenfield, the using manager. It's a big change from years after Facebook's $715 million acquisition of Instagram. At the time, Instagram also needed to rely on Facebook to provide it with the infrastructure it needed for advertiser relationships and growth. Now, Facebook needs Help from Instagram.

Instagram is on track to break $10bn in revenue over the next 12 months, according to research by Jitendra Waral, an intelligence analyst at Bloomberg. According to Varal, Instagram is attracting new users faster than Facebook's main site, which will exceed 2 billion in the next five years. Although Facebook already has more than 2 billion users worldwide, Instagram's user base is younger and more attractive to advertisers. And unlike Facebook, Instagram is still growing in the U.S. home market.