Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has finally launched a long overdue pinch-to-zoom feature for its Instagram app.
The pinch-to-zoom feature was one of the most requested features for Instagram but Facebook has taken its time before finally answering the requests of the users. The newly added feature means users can now zoom in to view photos on the explore page and in the user profiles by zooming. The new addition also highlights numerous changes that have been made to the photo and video sharing platform over the last few months. Some of the changes have been made to maintain competitiveness with rival platforms such as Snapchat.
Prior to the addition of the pinch-to-zoom feature, Facebook a feature called Instagram Stories which was directly coined from Snapchat Stories which coincidentally has similar functions. The Instagram Stories feature suggests stories from other people that might be interesting to the user based on Instagram activity or the people that they follow. The pinch-to-zoom feature is currently only available for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS devices. However, the company is reportedly working on including support for the feature on Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google Android devices over the next few weeks.
Ralph Shackart, analyst at William Blair, interviewed an ad buyer on Facebook and she expects good return on investment and steady trend.
“She believes Facebook ad performance will continue to improve because it receives so much downstream data,” said Shackart.
Shackart further added “She said the quarter is tracking solidly with her customers’ spending up 50%-plus year over year, and she is not seeing any client budget slowdown.”
Instagram announced that its user base doubled to 500 million monthly users in June 2016 compared to the number of users that it had two years ago. Roughly 80% of the new users are from outside the US. Facebook claims that introducing the new feature will improve the monetization value of the platform. Instagram has 200,000 monthly advertisers and its ad revenue represents 5% of Facebook’s total revenue. This means that the platform generates a significant percentage of the revenue.
A contribution of 5% revenue for a company like Facebook is a huge margin when viewed in perspective with the large amount of revenue that the company makes. It is, therefore, important for Facebook to throw in fresh features to keep things exciting. This goes a long way in maintaining the already existing users and also attracts new users.
