Diffusion of Innovations and Instagram's Popularity

The Diffusion of Innovations theory tries to explain how, why, and at what rate new innovations are spread. The theory was published by Everett Rogers, a professor of communication studies. He argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the members of a social system. Rogers also points out in his book that members of the "early adopters" and "early majority" category tend to be younger, better educated, more affluent, better connected, more extroverted, and are willing to take more risks. As is shown in this diagram, a population is divided into different groups of people who adopt the innovation over time, represented with the blue bell-curve. The yellow S-curve represents how much of the market is saturated with the innovation, in other words, how many people adopt the innovation over time. If you want to learn further about the theory, I suggest you check out the website linked here.

Instagram was launched on October 6, 2010, and is the third most popular social media platform, following Facebook and YouTube, with around one billion monthly users. In its first eighteen months, April 2012, it only had 50 million users, so in accordance with the theory, it started out slow. It then started to pick up speed as more and more people were downloading it and using it. This diagram matches with the first half of the diffusion S-curve, and I imagine the amount of users will start to level off.
According to several studies about why Instagram is so popular, most have said the same thing, and it makes sense. As humans, we prefer to interpret visual images rather than written text. Instagram was the first social media platform that allowed people to share only images, and it took off from there. Visual images is not only what makes Instagram so popular - it is also the reason why visual marketing has been booming recently as well. I personally love using Instagram and seeing the pictures all my friends post. I agree that it does cause lots and lots of mental health issues for a lot of people, but I enjoy using the platform.