Reader Forum: The impact of photo and video sharing apps on mobile networks

According to Nielsen data, Instagram was the fastest growing app in 2013, seeing its audience surge 66% to 32 million. With nearly 200 million users combined, video apps like Instagram and Vine aren’t going out of style any time soon. The demographics of these popular video social networking applications are heavily leaning toward teenagers, and create an attractive mobile-based platform for many brands to utilize in order to reach this target market. In all likelihood, these apps will continue on their upward shift and impact the mobile networks as the user base grows.
With over 150 million active users, there is no question that the explosive growth of Facebook’s Instagram hasn’t just meant an overwhelming amount of filtered pictures floating around the Internet. Following the introduction of video capabilities, the social platform set out to compete with Twitter’s popular video-sharing app, Vine. But what has the effect been on mobile networks? While it is too early to know the exact impact these platforms will have on the networks, if they continue on their projected growth curve, these platforms are sure to cause strain and traffic overload.
The first social media to create the video storm was Vine, which allowed users to post looping six second videos. The company debuted its app on January 24, 2013. By June, Instagram, an online photo-sharing social networking service, incorporated video sharing, allowing users to record and share videos up to 15 seconds long. Over 90% of the active Instagram users are under the age of 35 and 68% of users are female. When last surveyed in June 2013 just before Instagram launched video, Vine reportedly had 40 million registered users, and Vine tends to skew younger than Instagram in terms of age range of users – making both tools viable for marketers looking to target a young group of people.
Thanks to industry analytics, we have seen mobile video use skyrocket over the past decade, accounting for an average of 50% of mobile data traffic. Within some networks, mobile video data traffic is approaching a 70% share of all traffic and the growing popularity of video sharing platforms is sure to only increase this figure. With this in mind, Citrix recently took a look at video sharing platforms Instagram Video and Vine, to see what impact they are having on mobile data traffic. The report found that Instagram video is currently generating 15-30% of Instagram mobile app traffic and the average Instagram video is 1.8 times larger than the average Vine video.
While Instagram video and Vine are both video-sharing apps, there are some significant differences in the platforms. Most notably, Instagram allows for 15 second videos while Vine is limited to six seconds. Regardless of the relatively short length of these videos, they are both impacting the networks based on the sheer amount of these short-form mobile videos being shared. While Vine is integrated into Twitter, Instagram is integrated into Facebook, therefore having the potential to reach more users and increasing views on videos shared on that particular platform.
Since these platforms have come on the scene, there has been a proliferation in other photo and video sharing apps and they too are gaining traction. Instagram and Vine are the clear front runners of this type of app, but there are others climbing the ranks in the app popularity contest. On the photo-sharing side there are apps such as Snapchat, Flickr, Snapfish, and Shutterfly, all which are platforms allowing users to easily edit and share their photos. For video-sharing platforms, there is YouTube Capture, Snapverse, Viddy, MixBit, and Klip, just to name a few. Following in the footsteps of Instagram, some photo sharing platforms, like Snapchat, are incorporating video capabilities, only adding to the already-competitive landscape and video traffic on the networks.
Another contributing factor to the mobile data traffic explosion is Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. The Internet giant recently integrated auto-play for mobile videos. Now when users go to the Facebook app on their phone, all mobile videos will automatically play without sound, (once the video is clicked on, the video will play with sound). Many consider this to be a precursor to the social network’s plans to incorporate mobile video ads into the platform, which was previously announced in October. While the auto-play of mobile videos does essentially force an increase in viewership of videos on mobile devices, it has also had its repercussions for the subscriber in terms of user satisfaction. With many consumers now touting multiple mobile devices, data usage is a concern and these auto play videos eat away at their precious data allowances, even if they were not interested in viewing the video in the first place.
Our society is rapidly moving toward expectations of sharing our experiences through social media in real time. The popularity of mobile video and photo sharing apps is spreading like wildfire and new players are sure to continue to emerge across the mobile app landscape. As these new platforms emerge, there is sure to be an increase in photo and video traffic, further straining mobile networks. Combine this with the fact that current user growth is showing no signs of slowing down, and add the fact that Instagram and Facebook are set to add mobile video ads to the mix, and you have a recipe for major data traffic jams on already stressed networks.