With almost everything happening online, there are loads of different ways to market online. Two such ways that are widely popular are Influencer marketing and Affiliate marketing. Let’s admit, the confusion about which one of the two is better has led us to find ourselves scratching our heads over which online marketing strategy is better - Influencer marketing or Affiliate marketing?
Well, fret not. We have just the answer for you! But before we jump right in, let us have a quick conversation about both.

What is Affiliate Marketing?
 Say you are looking for an itinerary to visit India, so you check for a travel blogger’s website that could offer you a free itinerary for a 10 day trip. You check out their entire blog post and notice there is a link to avail discount on car rentals. You click on that link and end up availing the offer.
Apart from you availing an offer on car rentals, there are two other things that happened here:
1. The travel blogger earned revenue from it (percentage of the sale or a fixed fee); and
2. The car rental service just got a lead and converted it into a sale.
This, is affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing refers to an arrangement between a brand and an ‘affiliate’ (could be individual or a business or another website) wherein the brand pays a percentage of sale that takes place through a unique link on the affiliate’s website.

What are the benefits of Affiliate Marketing?
1. Performance Based
Affiliate programs are generally performance oriented, meaning an affiliate only earns if a person actually makes a purchase using the affiliate’s link. This performance based incentive drives affiliates to bring in more leads and conversions.

2. Cost-effective
In case of affiliate marketing, it is not just the initial costs that are low, but it is also cost-effective overall. In case of other online ad-placements you have to pay a fixed amount irrespective of whether you get leads or not. And more often than not, these leads prove to be just a squander of time, money and other resources. But, in case of affiliate marketing you only pay affiliates for actual conversions, meaning, no more spending big money on valueless leads.

3. Boosts traffic
Affiliate marketing per se does not boost your SEO rankings, but having multiple affiliates enables you to boost traffic on your website. More the number of affiliates that back link to your website, more will be the number of actual leads browsing through your website and thus a boost in your website’s traffic.

4. Increased sales conversion
We have already deduced the fact that valueless leads are a waste of time, money and other resources. But, affiliate marketing brings you actual leads that often convert into sales.

5. Easy to implement and track results
Implementation costs of affiliate marketing are bare minimum. On the other hand, understanding the return on investment is easy too. Every affiliate is given a unique link and any clicks or sales via affiliate marketing can be precisely traced back to the exact affiliate. This makes it easy for you to track the performance of each affiliate in your affiliate program.

What is Influencer Marketing?
Influencer marketing refers to the marketing of a product or service with the help of an influencer. The reason they are called influencers is because they have the ability to affect the purchases of their followers who could be your potential consumers. These influencers have over the years built their personal brand in desired niches and created a fairly loyal follower base.
Why is Influencer Marketing advantageous?

1. Unmatched ROI
Rate of return is an important factor for measuring the success of any online marketing campaign. Influencer marketing has a great rate of return. Infact, influencer marketing has a better rate of return (ROI) in comparison with print media too.

2. Targeting the right audience
Niche targeting is a major advantage of influencer marketing. With influencer marketing, you can target an influencer’s widespread audience at once. All you have to do is find the right influencer!

3. Credible
Influencer marketing is credible and statistics prove that to you. According to statistics:
 - 70% of teens trust influencers more than traditional celebrities
 - 86% of women seek purchase related advices from social media
 - 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations
Influencers have the ability to influence because they provide their followers with value, inspiration and build a long lasting connection with them. Their followers trust them and the statistics make it clear as a day, that influencer marketing is credible.

4. Suitable to All Businesses
Be it a multi-national, a mide-size firm or even a local mom and pop shop, influencer marketing if done right, works for all.

5. It is not pushy
Can you imagine the level of saturation people have hit that they are now spending their hard earned money to block online ads? But how will you get past these ad-blockers? They are everywhere!
Two words. Influencer marketing is your answer. Influencer marketing has a human factor that regular online ads do not. The very human nature of influencer marketing is what helps you break through the barriers of ad-blockers.

6. Cost Effective
When it comes to influencer marketing, businesses need not burn their pockets to advertise as in the case of billboard or television advertises. Also, compared to affiliate marketing, influencer marketing provides a better reach and to more people at a given point of time.

7. Lead Generation
Influencer marketing helps you generate relevant leads. Because, influencers having well defined niches have instilled in the minds of their followers an image of being an expert in their respective niche. Influencer marketing helps you skip past the pain and pressure of generating false leads.

8. Boosts SEO
Influencer marketing is a great way to boost SEO. Influencers, while marketing your product, create relevant content surrounding your product. This relevancy increases your domain authority score and thus boosts your SEO.

WHAT MAKES INFLUENCER MARKETING BETTER THAN AFFILIATE MARKETING?
With affiliate marketing, you can achieve sales conversions, but with influencer marketing you can do much more. A proper influencer marketing helps you achieve not only leads and conversions but also the following:
  - Increased brand awareness
  - Build an audience
  - Reach a wider audience
  - Build reputation.
SO WHAT SHOULD YOU CHOOSE?
The obvious choice seems influencer marketing. But, we’ll let you in on a secret! A right blend of affiliate marketing with influencer marketing will give you optimum results and the best of both worlds.

Move Up

Billions of internet users like you and me, pay zero bucks to use social media sites. This leaves us pondering as to how they earn their revenue by providing free social media platforms to so many users from around the world. The one word answer is “Advertising”. A crucial observation, as was rightly stated in the Netflix documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’, is that if you are not paying for a product, the product is you. Social media sites gather a certain set of audience, which runs into millions, at one place i.e. the social media platform. This gives businesses a chance to advertise their products to such huge masses of people, at the same place and time, which was not possible with traditional marketing methods.

Social media brought with it entirely new ways of sharing information, generating source of income, staying connected with loved ones and much more. User friendliness and the free-to-use feature increased the traffic on social networking sites. This increased traffic on social media harboured a well balanced demand and supply of content. Social media sites gave people a platform to showcase their talents to people across the globe, hone their creative side, a new source of entertainment, infotainment, etc. Content creators earned money from their content on YouTube, Facebook, etc. which gradually developed into a source of earning big bucks for content creators from social media platforms. This was possible due to the wide reach that these platforms provided.

Until recently, content creators could grow their personal brand organically without having to pay social media sites to reach their desired audiences. However, due to the growth potential and the revenue generation goals of these platforms, lately there has been a downward trend in the organic growth that was once achievable rather easily. Instagram’s algorithm is designed in a way to show you content that they think you might love. This way, Instagram succeeds in getting you to spend more time on the platform and showing more and more ads during that span. Organic growth was simpler earlier and depended majorly on the supply and demand of content in various niches and not on the bucks that content creators paid to these sites to reach audiences.

Users first noticed this decline in organic growth and engagement rates in Facebook, and other social media sites like Instagram have seemed to catch on. A study conducted by Social@Ogilvy revealed that organic growth for brands on Facebook decreased from 12.05% to 6.15% between October 2013 to February 2014. Meanwhile, another article by Neil Patel revealed that organic reach of pages on Facebook had fallen to 2% to June 2016. Whereas, in 2019, this figure hovered around as low as 1%. Given this downward trend, it is not surprising that the engagement rate on Instagram decreased from 1.2% to 0.8%. According to RivalIQ’s analysis, which was based on a different data set, the median engagement rate on Instagram in 2020 decreased from 1.60% to 1.22%. This decreasing engagement rate naturally led to businesses and even content creators and influencers to pay money in order to reach their desired audiences.

While this downward trend in engagement rate may have been expected by the brands and businesses on social media, however the changing algorithm has affected influencers as well. As part of their influencer marketing campaigns, brands choose influencers who not only resonate to their brand and brand values, but also those who consistently have a high engagement rate. Due to the latest updates in Instagram’s algorithm, influencers and content creators have come out and talked about how they are not receiving the same kind of engagement levels as before. A low engagement level does not look good for influencers as it impacts the potential brand deals and collaborations. This further affects revenue generation for influencers and existing brand associations.

Instagram mainly has certain decisive factors that create your feed, consisting of Interest, Relationship, Timeliness, Frequency, Following and Usage. Understanding each of these decisive factors helps to overcome the challenges posed by Instagram algorithms. Meanwhile, other ways to grow organically are to focus on your core audience, optimize your social media handles, strategize your content, engage with your audience, analyze each post with in-app insights tools. Further, in case you need a little push to grow, consider paid ads as the audience you attract from sponsored posts also help you gain followers that are authentic.

Merely due to the challenges that the algorithms pose, social media has not become redundant. In fact, it is quite the opposite. There is more and more quality content being churned out everyday, more and more businesses getting on board to have a social media presence. More importantly, social media is the new marketplace and influencer marketing is the new age marketing.

Move Up

An industry projected to be worth $15 billion in 2022, has brought with it tremendous growth opportunities which also makes up for the reason why in 2019 alone, over 300 new influencer marketing platforms and agencies were established. With influencer marketing providing returns higher than print advertisement, it has established itself to become one of the most preferred online marketing strategies.

Technological advancements in majority sectors have given rise to automation for increased efficiency. And with this increasing scope of automation in major business aspects including different marketing activities, it would be naive of us to not expect automation in influencer marketing as well.

What is Automation of Influencer Marketing?
Automation of Influencer marketing refers to the use of technology to perform the important and rather tedious tasks involved in influencer marketing such as choosing the right influencers out of hundreds and thousands, calculation of engagement rate, content scheduling, workflow automation, calculation of returns per influencer, etc. Marketers use software programs or artificial intelligence ("AI" - software that has a self learning feature) for the purpose of automation of influencer marketing.

Why is Automation needed?
Influencer marketing has picked up at a fast pace and businesses are in a pursuit to match up to it.
However, these businesses are facing a few common problems such as:
1. Influencer discovery and shortlisting
2. Briefing and expectations
3. Price negotiations
4. Reminders and follow-ups
5. Performance tracking

These tasks, which if done manually are tedious in nature. They cost businesses time and expenditure on added resources which are required to undertake them. To tackle these problems, automation of influencer marketing in the right amount is absolutely needed. However, automation of tasks comes with its fair set of challenges.

Does automation of influencer marketing have any challenges?
The reason why influencer marketing works so well compared to other ways of online marketing is due to the very human nature of it. Sure online ads like search engine ads, affiliate links, YouTube ads, etc. help you reach targeted audiences, but what they lack is the ability to make your customers - regular or potential - feel connected. Additionally, many digital ads do not possess the ability to surpass ad blockers.

While automation helps you in reducing the time and efforts you put in tedious activities, implementing the same in influencer marketing may seem challenging. Unlike Google ads or Facebook ads where you do not need regular follow-ups or continuous interventions for ads to run, that is not the case with influencer marketing. With influencer marketing every post requires a human intervention at most levels either from influencers or brands or both.

If automated to one hundred percent, influencer marketing that seems to be working out well for brands, could lead to a bad user experience as AI lacks the very ability of creativity and discretion that humans possess. This bad user experience as a resultant of lack of human touch could more likely become the beginning of the end of influencer marketing.

Do the benefits outweigh the challenges of influencer marketing automation?
Our compilation will help you decide for yourself if the benefits outweigh challenges or vice versa. Because influencer marketing has a human touch to it, the idea of automation creates a virtual setback in the minds of skeptical marketers. It is true that influencer marketing cannot be automated to one hundred percent, just like certain business activities such as critical decision making which cannot be automated. But, it is also true that automation of influencer marketing is only for the better, if done right.

Automation of influencer marketing helps you in:
1. Discovery and shortlisting the right influencers
2. Calculation of engagement rates of each influencer
3. Provides a seamless communication process between brands and influencers
4. Tracking of performance
5. Gives detailed campaign reports from engagement level to keyword level analytics.

Apart from this, automation also helps you reduce the expenditure on resources as well as saves the ‘time-cost’ expended by those resources in carrying out redundant activities. It also allows marketers to focus more on creativity, which happens to be a key part of influencer marketing campaigns or any marketing campaign for that matter.

What should you do?
According to IDC Group, a premier global marketing intelligence firm, “Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today's marketers. If you haven't gotten started yet, you are already behind the 8 ball”.
To get yourself out of that position, determine the requirements of your brand and its goals. Team up with influencer marketing platforms that help you strike the right balance between automation and elements that need just the right amount of human touch for your influencer marketing campaigns.

Move Up

Among 7 billion people around the world, there is not one who is not directly or indirectly affected by the world’s digitization. Living in a digital world, we are all aware about the part social media has played in our lives. From bringing our close ones closer to becoming a source of entertainment to generating mass employment, social media has become an inherent part of our lives.

But do we know who founded these social media sites? Who owns them now? What is the current usage statistics? Over the years, we have seen the invention and growth of social media sites and in some cases, their fall and eventual shutdown too. Read on to know some brief facts of the founders of popular social media sites, their ownership and the usage statistics.

1. Facebook
We are no strangers to Facebook, the most popular social media website. According to data released by Facebook, it has close to 2.5 billion monthly active users worldwide and over 1.6 billion people visit the website on a daily basis.

Facebook is owned by the American company Facebook, Inc. It all began in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg, along with his 3 fellow Harvard students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes launched “TheFacebook”, the name by which current day “Facebook” was originally known. Initially, they launched a site by the name “Facemash”, in which users had to rate the photos of students on the site as to who is the “hotter one”. While it gained popularity initially, it was later shut down and then came “TheFacebook”, which was launched only for Harvard students. Seeing its popularity, it was then opened for other students of Yale, Stanford and Columbia. On becoming a widespread phenomenon among college goers, Facebook was later opened to ages 13 and above.

Ever since its inception, Facebook’s growth has known no bounds. By December 2004, Facebook had 1 million users and by July 2010, it had more than 500 million active users. With a foresight for more growth, it announced the acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp in April 2012 and February 2014. Later, in March 2014, it also announced the acquisition of Oculus, a company focussed on virtual reality hardware and software. Amidst this, it also hit the 1 billion membership mark and also became a public company in 2012. Through the IPO Facebook raised a massive $16 billion. This also gave the company a market value of $102.4 billion. Facebook’s addictive nature and a free to use feature led more and more people to get onto the social media site. Currently, an average person spends an hour on Facebook every day. Earlier it was estimated that the usage would remain rather flat in 2020, however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been the opposite. With a massive community within Facebook’s reach, it is by default the top choice for marketers.

2. Youtube
The go-to social media website for sharing and streaming videos is none other than YouTube. A social media site to which people turn to for all sorts of video content ranging from beauty tutorials, DIY activities, recipe videos, live game streaming to daily vlogs, product advertisements and everything in between and beyond, YouTube has it all. With over 2 billion monthly logged in users, YouTube has emerged as the second most visited website in the world. Alphabet, Inc., which owns Google LLC and a few other social media sites also owns YouTube, the No.1 video sharing and social media website. It was founded in 2005 by 3 PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The concept was initially to make it an online dating service, which is why it was named “Tune In, Hook Up”. However the concept failed, but its video uploading and sharing platform stood out. After the famous Super Bowl halftime show, the three founders looked for Justin Timberlake’s performance online. On failing to find any online record of his performance, they had an eureka moment when they realized there existed no such platform where people could share and watch videos online.

The first ever YouTube video was uploaded on April 23, 2005 titled “Me at the Zoo”. It started as an angel funded company with an office above a pizzeria. Within a month, YouTube had a traffic of 30,000 viewers a day on its website. By July 2006 it was delivering ~100 million video views per day. On the other hand, Google had failed in its own video platform. Seeing the growth and scaling of YouTube, Google LLC purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in stocks - which was Google’s second largest acquisition back then.

With an ability to cater to all sorts of demography, YouTube, which was earlier free of advertisements, became monetized and also carved out a different type of employment source for hundreds and thousands of content creators we see today. Today, people upload 500 hours worth of videos every minute, and each user spends an approximate of 11 minutes on YouTube every day. YouTube serves as a great platform for audience building for both individuals and brands.

3. Twitter
Without a doubt, one of the most popular microblogging sites is Twitter. Earlier, “Tweets” or “Tweeting”, were referred only to the light chirping sound made by birds. But in today’s date, the two words now have a meaning more to do with Twitter rather than their original meanings itself. Such is the popularity of Twitter. It has more than 330 million active monthly users worldwide.

Twitter is owned by the American company Twitter, Inc. Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams came up with the idea of Twitter during a brainstorming session held by Odeo, their podcasting company. With Apple’s announcement of including podcast streaming on iTunes, the founders felt that Odeo, which they created for streaming podcasts, was bound to fail. After buying back stakes from investors of Odeo, the 4 founders of Twitter finally launched “Twttr” - which is now known as Twitter - in 2006.

While Jack Dorsey sent out the first tweet on March 21, 2006, it was then made available to Odeo’s employees. It wasn’t until July 2006 that Twitter was finally made available to the public. The popular hashtags we see today made its debut on the platform in 2007. Twitter later acquired a video clip company called Vine and launched it as a separate app in January 2013

which became a popular short video sharing app. The company went public in 2013, which gave it a valuation of ~$31 billion. Initially, Twitter limited the character to 140 which now, has been increased to 280 to cater to the current age smartphone users.

Although Twitter failed to have a grand launch at a Love Parade in 2006, today about 500 millions tweets are sent out each day and approximately 23% of internet users are on Twitter. With the introduction of advertisements in the form of promoted tweets, Twitter became an important social media site for marketing.

4. Instagram
The no.1 photo and video sharing app and a popular social media site is Instagram. With over 1 billion active monthly users, Instagram makes the cut to the top 5 social media sites. It also has a higher per post engagement compared to any other social media platforms.

Instagram’s inception dates back to 2010. Kevin Systrom, a Stanford graduate developed a prototype by the name “Burbn”, wherein users were allowed to post their photos, plans and check-ins. His turning point came when he received a seed funding of $500K. He along with Mike Kreiger re-assesed Burbn and decided to make photo sharing the crux of their app. Inspired by Hipstamatic, an app in the photography segment and Facebook, a social media platform, Systrom and Kreiger after careful evaluations and redesigning of Burbn, launched the Instagram app for iOS in October 2010. On its launch day, the app gained 25,000 users; 100K by the end of first week and by December, it touched the one million user mark.

With a high growth rate like this, many investors became keen to invest in the app. Twitter reportedly made an offer of $500 million to acquire Instagram, which was declined by Systrom. By March 2012 Instagram’s user base had already grown to 27 million, who were purely iOS users. And it wasn’t until April 2012 that Instagram released its app for Android users. In the same month, Facebook made an offer to acquire Instagram at $1 billion in cash and stock, which went through and thereby made Facebook, Inc. the owner of Instagram.

With new features added from time to time, Instagram gave its users new added value and continues to do so. Recently, in a bid to take on TikTok and the gaining popularity of the short video segment, Instagram took to releasing it’s own version of TikTok like feature, “Reels”. Instagram’s evolution from being a photo-sharing app to becoming a short video sharing app and generating income to hundreds and thousands of its users, it has succeeded in building a wide user base of over 500 million daily active users. It records about 4.2 billion likes per day and an average person spends over 50 minutes on the app each day.

5. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a dedicated social media site for professionals and businesses looking for professional connections. It also acts as a job search platform for job seekers. After crossing the half-billion mark, LinkedIn has more than 675 monthly users currently.

At present, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, Inc. But, it was originally launched in 2003 by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean-Luc Vaillant. By August of 2004, LinkedIn had 1 million users. It wasn’t until March 2006 that LinkedIn had its very first month of profitability. Being called the “Facebook” for business, LinkedIn started gaining widespread popularity leading it to reach 1o million users in April 2007 and eventually launching their mobile app to cater and adapt to its users’ newer needs. After receiving multiple rounds of funding, LinkedIn expanded its presence by opening offices Mumbai, India in 2009 and later on in Sydney, Australia. This marked their expansion in the Asia Pacific region.

LinkedIn stood 10th on Silicon Valley Insider’s list of “Top 100 most valuable start-ups” in 2010. In May 2011, LinkedIn went public and its shares rose to 171% of its listing price. In the following years, LinkedIn faced a few ups and downs including the plummeting of its share prices by 43.6% in a single day. It was in June of 2016, that Microsoft announced its acquisition of LinkedIn - the largest acquisition ever made by it - for a whopping $26.2 billion. In the same year, LinkedIn reached a user count of 400 million users. It also made a few notable acquisitions which includes mSpoke, Pulse, Bright.com, Slideshare, Careerify and Lynda.com (now LinkedIn learning).

Retaining its status as the most popular professional networking site, LinkedIn has over 660 million users, with its biggest market country-wise being US, followed by India and China respectively. An average LinkedIn user spends about 10 minutes on the app on a daily basis. With its forte being building professional connections, LinkedIn is also the most used social media app amongst the Fortune 500 companies - thereby proving it to be the No.1 social media site for professionals.

6. Snapchat
Snapchat, another popular image and video sharing app has over 238 million active users. It reportedly added 9 million daily active users since 2020’s first quarter. The main reason for its popularity being its unique feature where the content shared user to user disappears within 10 seconds or according to the time set by the sender.

The owner of Snapchat is Snap, Inc., an American company. It was started in 2011 by its founders Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown. However, the initial thought was conceived when Brown was stoned and told his friends at Stanford that he wished to find a way to send photos to his friends that would later disappear. This thought later turned into an idea when he discussed it with Spiegel, who thought it to be a multi-million dollar idea. The first version of Snapchat was created by Spiegel and Murphy and launched as “Picaboo”, which was only available to iOS users. The screenshot notification we see today came as a result of the lower than expected recognition of Picaboo. As the iPhone users could take screenshots of images that were actually supposed to disappear within 10 seconds, this defeated the entire idea and innovation behind the app. In September 2011, Picaboo was rebranded as Snapchat and launched. By October 2012, the app was also launched for Android users. Within a year, it also reported that its users were sending 20 million images each day or 231 images per second and by December 2012, the figures rose to 50 million snaps per day. Snapchat further released new features later on where people could share videos, upload stories and chat too.

150 million images were being shared per day by April of 2013. Eyeing this growth, the company received offers from different tech giants including Facebook and Google. The founders who did not find it interesting enough to trade their company for these short term gains, denied all these offers for acquisition of Snapchat. Later on, Snapchat itself went on to make an acquisition of Vergence Labs for $15 million in December 2014. The company went public in February 2017 and raised close to $30 billion in market capitalization on the first day of trading. Snapchat’s other acquisitions include Bitstrips, Zenly and Looksery, among others. This ephemeral content sharing app currently has 238 million daily active users of which it added 9 million daily active users since the Quarter 1 of 2020. These numbers have shown that although the app lost over a 100 million users in early 2018 due to the change in its app design, the numbers have quite picked up and its popularity is only on the rise.

7. Reddit
Claiming to be the “front page of the internet”, Reddit is a popular discussion and content sharing and rating website. It is often compared to a digital newspaper but with more interaction and things that people are actually consuming around the world on the internet. Reddit has over 430 million monthly active users worldwide and was the 5th most visited website in the US on Alexa in 2019.

It was founded by two college friends, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. The duo had initially launched an app “My Mobile Menu” to help users order food by sending a text message, which did not turn out fruitful to them. The idea of Reddit, which came up as a result of a brainstorming session held by “Y Combinator”, a start-up incubator. With the help of funding received from Y Combinator, Huffman coded the site and in June 2005, Reddit was launched by Huffman and Ohanian. October 2006 marks the year in which they sold the company to Conde Nast Publications. Now, Reddit operates as an independent subsidiary of Advance Publications, Inc., the parent company of Conde Nast.

Reddit allowed its users to create custom subreddits from 2008. However, users need to meet certain criterias to be able to create one. A major turn of events took place in 2009 when both the founders decided to leave Reddit, only to return to Reddit in leadership roles in 2014. Amidst this, multiple events took place including decommissioning of the last of its physical servers and moving to Amazon Web Services, negative publicity relating to certain subreddits and Reddit becoming operationally independent of Conde Nast Publications. Like other social media sites, Reddit had a fair share of its negative publicity. Many of the user created subreddits received backlash, prominent of which were related to violence on women and sale of guns on the site. Contrary to expectations given all the backlash, the number of users of Reddit have been on the rise.

Reddit boasts a massive 30 billion+ views a month and caters to over 430 million active users a month. Reddit is the top website where tech enthusiasts are mostly found. An average Reddit user spends about 15 minutes a day on the site. While many get lost in the UI of Reddit, once they get used to its UI, the users can mostly be seen lost in the amusing content and discussions that are seen on Reddit, leaving them to want and explore more and more content.

8. TikTok / Douyin
One of the fastest growing social media services is TikTok. It is an app that allows its users to create and share 15 second videos. Its popularity is so immense that worldwide, it has about 800 million monthly active users currently. And all it took was 4 years since its inception to reach this number. In the Chinese market, TikTok is better known as Douyin.

TikTok / Douyin is owned by the Chinese internet technology company, ByteDance Ltd. Its history can be divided in two parts:
1. Launch of Douyin by ByteDance
2. The launch of Musical.ly and its acquisition by ByteDance.

1. Launch of Douyin by ByteDance: Douyin was launched by ByteDance, a Chinese tech company specifically for the Chinese market in September 2016. Its original name was “A.me”, but was later rebranded as Douyin. The app is said to have been developed within just 200 days and counted 100 million users in a year. The app had 1 billion views on videos per day.

2. Musical.ly and its acquisition by ByteDance: The founders of Musical.ly, Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang initially created an educational social networking site, where users could learn and teach in the form of short videos of 3- 5 minutes each. After 6 long months of developing the app, the app was launched but it failed to get the expected traction. Seeing the failure of this app, they switched their focus to the entertainment industry. With the remaining chunk from their original funds, they worked on and developed Musical.ly. They founded Musical.ly Inc., the company which owned the Musical.ly app. The app was launched for both American and Chinese market. Compared to the Chinese market, Musical.ly received a better response from the US market. The app gained millions of users by June 2015 and also ranked as the No.1 app on iOS App store. It also crossed 70 million downloads in 2016.

In November 2017, Musical.ly was sold to ByteDance for about $1 billion, to capture the markets outside China. This acquisition marked the end of Musical.ly and was launched in 2018 as “TikTok” worldwide. TikTok is now available in over 150 countries and 75 languages.

Its dominance in the short video sharing segment led to creation of many other similar applications by competitors including the launch of Instagram Reels. Apart from facing fierce competition, TikTok has also faced backlash for having tie-up with the Chinese government and sharing its users data with the said government. This led to the ban of TikTok India. Further, even the US is said to follow the footsteps of India in banning the same for similar reasons. This had led to the potential takeover of TikTok’s US operation by Microsoft and India’s operations by Reliance. However, it is still unclear as to whether the deals would go through.

With TikTok’s ban in India, the app immediately lost 200 million of its users. If the same is done by the US, TikTok would further lose close to 100 million of its users. However, in spite of already losing 200 million users the app still has more than 600 million monthly active users, making it one among the top 10 most used social media apps.

9. Tinder
Tinder, an online dating app and a geosocial networking site, is by far one of the most popular dating sites today. It has over 50 million active profiles on Tinder and is available in 196 countries worldwide.

Tinder is owned by Tinder, Inc., whose parent company is Match Group, Inc. an American internet company. Match Group, Inc. owns over 20 other online dating services of which the popular ones are Hinge, OkCupid and Tinder. Sean Rad, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Mateen, Joe Munoz, Whitney Wolfe and Chris Gylczynski came up with the idea of Tinder. It was launched within a startup incubator called Hatch Labs as a joint venture between IAC - which was the holding company of Match Group - and Xtreme Labs. Rad saw that there was an absence of a social media platform specifically for strangers to meet and date rather than connecting with people they already knew - a gap that Tinder perfectly fixed. Another interesting thing that Rad noticed was that people felt more comfortable approaching a person if they knew that the other person wanted to approach them too. Keeping these two things in mind, Rad and the others founded Tinder.

To build a user base, Tinder first targeted colleges in the year it launched. In the very next year, Tinder won the “Best New Startup” Award by TechCrunch. It became one among the top 25 social networking apps in May 2013. Tinder recorded a massive one billion swipes per day in October 2014, which produced 12 million matches. Around the same time, it also recorded that an average user spent around 90 minutes per day on the app. The swipe feature that people widely associate with Tinder, actually came as an inspiration to co-founder Badeen while wiping his foggy bathroom mirror. This swipe feature made Tinder the first “swipe-app”, following which many apps came up with this feature. It also released various other features like Rewind feature to bring back the previously rejected profiles, Boost feature to make a profile the most visible in the user’s area for 30 minutes, Tinder Plus. It also launched Tinder Gold, which is a members-only service with exclusive features like Passport, Unlimited likes, Boosts and other profile controls.

Tinder has amassed over 55 million users and generates more than 26 million matches every day. Since inception, there have been 1 billion matches on the app. In India - where Tinder established its first international office - the app recorded 7.5 million swipes daily. With a usage statistics of this kind, Tinder makes the cut as the top online dating site currently.

10. Pinterest
The go-to website for 400 million active monthly users, Pinterest is a social media site to find ideas and inspiration surrounding almost all things in life be it home decor, hairstyle, beauty to building designs and everything in between and beyond. It is a place of visual discovery where users can pin, browse and share their favourite ideas.

Pinterest, which is owned by the American company Pinterest, Inc., was founded and launched in 2010 as a closed beta. The core founders of Pinterest were Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra. In just a period of 9 months, it recorded a total of 10,000 users. In 2011, with the release of their iOS app, they brought in a higher than expected number of users and in the very same year, Pinterest was also listed in Time Magazine’s ‘50 Best Websites of 2011’. In 2012, Pinterest was opened to public meaning, users no longer needed a request or an invitation to join the site.

In 2014, the company launched ‘Promoted Pins’ which was said to allow companies to display sponsored results and eventually opened up promoted pins for all advertisers. Seeing the Company’s growth prospects, it received multiple rounds of funding and investments, while on the other hand, Pinterest also made many investments, such as Punchfork, Livestar, Hackermeter in 2013 followed by VisualGraph and Icebergs in 2014 to name a few. The Company went public and was listed in 2019.

Currently, the majority of Pinterest users are female (~70%) and the average time a user spends on Pinterest is over 14 minutes. As of 2019, Pinterest recorded over 200 billion saved pins. While many users are said to use Pinterest to follow their favourite brands and to derive ideas, it is also important to know that the majority of the searches on Pinterest are not related to brands. It is a place for businesses to market however big or small they may be.

11. Tumblr
Another popular microblogging and social networking site is Tumblr. The site has over 463 million blogs with more than 171.4 billion posts.
Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in 2007. Lead developer Marco Arment is of significant importance in the development of this micro blogging site. Within two weeks of its launch, it gained ~75,000 users. Few years later, in 2012 Tumblr announced that it would begin paid advertising on the platform. Seeing its growth, Yahoo! paid $1.1 billion and bought Tumblr. Yahoo! had to write down $712 million of Tumblr’s value as the advertising goals were not met. Later in 2017, when Verizon Communications acquired Yahoo! Tumblr came along with it and both were placed in Verizon’s ‘Oath’ division. In December 2018, when Tumblr announced the removal of pornographic content and stricter content policy, its trafic dipped from 521 million to 437 million in January. Later in 2019, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic, Inc. who own WordPress - which used to be Tumblr’s competitor for ~$3 million.
Currently, there are over 22 million posts on the site each day. Majority of Tumblr’s traffic comes from the US, amounting to ~33.8%.

12. Quora
Quora is a popular social network for people to ask and answer questions. The site currently has over 300 million unique visitors. The website has also become an important part of social media marketing for many marketers.

Quora is owned by Quora, Inc. The site was founded by Adam D’Angelo and Charlie Cheever in 2009. The site was opened to the public in 2010. Various programs like Top Writers Program, Quora Partner Program and interactive changes such as blogs, video answers, Sharing, etc. were introduced by Quora to increase engagement and encourage more people to get on board.

In 2016, Quora rolled out its first advertisement on the platform, which was from Uber. This marked the start of advertisements on the platform. In the same year, Quora became more inclusive of languages and introduced different languages like French, German and Italian. Later on other languages like Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese, etc were also introduced.

Quora currently has close to 200 million monthly active users and majority of traffic on Quora comes from India, followed by the US and Canada respectively. Most users use the app as compared to its website and the average time spent by a person on Quora is about 4 minutes.

13. Flickr
Flickr, a favourite social media platform among photographers, has over 100 million accounts and currently hosts over billions of photographs shared by its users. It is one of the few popular photo management and sharing applications.
Flickr was founded by Stewart Buttefield and Caterina Fake and launched by their company ‘Ludicorp’ in 2004. It was actually developed for a multiplayer online game website called ‘Game Neverending’ and later turned into a chat system called ‘FlickrLive’ with a photo sharing option. Flickr started to gain popularity and soon witnessed an increase in its number of users. In 2005, Yahoo! Acquired both Ludicorp and Flickr. The upload limits were slowly increased to the point that all users, including free users were allowed free storage of 1 TB.

Other changes in 2013 included a ‘Justified view’ with ‘infinite scrolling and changes in the android app. Not many users welcomed the changes as they did not address the changes the users needed but rather seemed unnecessary. In 2017, along with Yahoo! Flickr too was acquired by Verizon Communications. Later in 2018, Smugmug acquired Flickr from Verizon. Post this acquisition, 1 TB free storage plan was terminated for free users from February 2019 which was later extended to March 2019. Currently, free users can upload only 1000 images irrespective of size whereas pro subscription charges ranging from $5.99 to $7.99 per month.

14. MySpace
MySpace is a social media website that can easily be said to have been the source of the rise of social media usage. During its prime years, it was the largest social media website. MySpace was founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe, Brad Greenspan, Josh Berman and Tom Anderson and was officially launched in 2004. The website saw a registration of 1 million users within the first month of its launch. They also held contests on who could get the most people to sign up on the site. MySpace gained widespread popularity among the young adults and the company was seeing a growth of 16 million monthly users. Seeing this level of growth, MySpace was bought by News Corporation for $580 million in 2005. In 2006, MySpace became the most visited website in the USA. In the very same year, the 100 millionth account was created on the website. Around the same time, Google signed a deal with MySpace of a whopping $900 million to gain exclusive rights to provide web search results on MySpace.

Although MySpace was constantly ahead of Facebook during its reign as the largest social media website, in 2008, Facebook overtook MySpace in terms of the web traffic generated. This marked the beginning of the end for MySpace. Some of the reasons for this downfall were the advertisement deal signed with Google which caused the site to slow down, buggy features, ineffective spam filter, etc. In 2011, MySpace started to notice a rather steep fall in its user base. The website and its parent company were sold to Time Inc., in 2016. Around this time, data of over 360 million MySpace accounts was being sold on the dark web, meaning there had occurred a data breach, but it is said that the breach had occurred between 2008 and 2009. But, while the site lasted, it is said to have had a huge impact during its time.

15. Orkut
Orkut was a social media website that had established a community of over 300 million users to meet friends - both old and new - and maintain relationships. However, its shut down was announced in 2014.

The social media site which was quite popular back in its days was launched by Google in 2004, which was developed by an employee, Orkut Büyükkökten, and also named after his first name ‘Orkut’. For a new user to be able to register and use Orkut, he/she had to be invited, which gave its users a sense of exclusivity. Within its first year, the site recorded a community of over 1 million. Over the lifetime of the site, its majority user base was from Brazil, followed by India. Around the same time, Facebook was launched and was on a growth mission to capture as many markets as possible. To do this, Facebook started off by addressing the pain points of users of Orkut and incorporating the ease of social media usage in Facebook. The competition, coupled with other legal issues and security concerns faced by Orkut and its users led to the eventual downfall in its number of users and an eventual shutdown in 2014. With a mission to create a similar kind of community, but with more love, Orkut Büyükkökten and a group of ex-Google engineers created and launched a new social media site named ‘Hello’ - the next generation of Orkut, which is owned by Hello Network, Inc.

16. Google+
A social media site that not only made an unfruitful attempt to take on Facebook as the top social media service website, Google+ (called as Google plus) but also got itself removed from even being in the list of current social media sites.

Google+ was owned and operated by Google LLC., whose parent company is Alphabet, Inc. It was officially released in June 2011. Much like Orkut, people could only use the site by way of an invitation-only system. This feeling of exclusivity created by Google+ led more and more users to want to get on Google+. It wasn't until September 2011 that the site was opened to everyone. While Google+ allowed its users to add people to “Circles” like family, work, etc., it did not have an option to add friends the way Facebook users could. However, the users liked Circles because it allowed them to see a specific set of people whose status updates or photos they wanted to see, instead of having to go through numerous posts before coming across the posts of their choice. Google+ also had many features that the other popular social media sites had probably not even thought of. For example, the integration of YouTube and Google drive by which the users could watch a video together, work on documents, etc. Another feature for which Google+ was applauded was Hangouts on Air, which attracted celebrities to broadcast their Hangout.

Google+ had 40 million users by October 2011 and before 2012, it reached a user count of 90 million. Further, the site developed to be integrated with Google’s other services like Gmail, Calendar and Google places. This integration seemed to work well for businesses who were advertising using Google. Seeing the growth of Google+, it is said that Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook announced a company wide ‘lockdown’ so that employees would work on aligning Facebook’s features with those provided by Google+.

October 2013 marked the period when Google+ reached a monthly user count of 540 million. The usage statistics show that a lot worked out in favour of Google+. However, one of the things that did not go well with users was the revelation of true identities of people on Google+. Fearing cyber threat, a lot of controversy arose against Google+ leading them to allow users to use pseudonyms. Further, in spite of unique features provided by Google+, people were still using Facebook more than Google, the user engagement difference between the two being massive. For every 3.3 minutes spent on Google+, users spent 7.5 hours on Facebook. The site was redesigned in 2015 to make it more simpler and faster, by adding and removing certain features. It was in October 2018 that Google announced the shutting down of Google+ by April 2019, citing reasons of engagement rates as low as 5 seconds by 90% of its users. The social media site is also seen as one of Google’ biggest failures. However, Google soft launched “Shoelace”, a platform for organizing small events and local activities. Owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, Shoelace was shut down in May 2020. Currently, Google+ like product “Currents” has become a full replacement of Google+ in Google’s business oriented G-Suite, to facilitate the internal communications within a company.

Over the years, we have seen many social networking platforms evolve and adapt to people’s changing needs and behavioural patterns. Those that were quick to adapt, stayed, while others got cut off. Also, with an increase in internet usage by people worldwide, there has been an increase in the time spent online, especially on social media sites.

To grab the attention of potential customers, marketers have long turned towards digital and social media marketing. Opportunistic social media sites entered the market to capitalize on this. Some thrived, while some were shut. In a market full of opportunities many sites still try to enter it and make it big. Some succeed, some fail. Irrespective of whether they thrive or shut down, one thing is crystal clear: Social media sites and its usage is not coming down anytime soon. If anything, it is only going to rise.

Move Up

The ban of TikTok in India left many content creators in a fix of what’s next. In a bid to tap into the short video market and capture the ex-users of TikTok, Instagram Reels has made a glorious entry in India - just in time. Since Wednesday, Indian users of the Instagram application have received its latest update - none other than “Reels”. What exactly is Instagram reels? What does it have in store for you? Let us find out.

What is “Reels”?
Reels, a part of the already existing Instagram app, is a newly introduced feature which allows users to create short videos upto 15 seconds. Reels has various features like choosing the speed of the video, adding effects, songs and also 1000s of filters to choose from. However, it is said that Reels is still under the testing phase. Currently, it is only available on the mobile version of the app and not the desktop version.

How does Reels work?
To create your very own Reels, all you need to do is open your Instagram stories camera and choose the ‘Reels’ option. To make it creative, Instagram gives you the option to choose from 1000s of filters, songs and do much more.
The videos can be shared to your stories, add them to a dedicated tab on your profile or slide it directly into a specific user’s DMs.
What makes Reels different from IGTV apart from the video duration, is that you don’t need to use too many relevant hashtags to reach your desired audience. If your account is public, you reels appear on the explore page of others, based on what they usually view or like or show interest in. Although, you can still use hashtags to get your videos featured on a particular page.
To view Reels, just tap on the explore page and voila, it would be there right in front of you. When you are done watching a Reels video, the next video will automatically be shown to you based on your interests. But there is no dedicated search specifically for Reels. One can also not know what is currently trending or about the new challenges happening like they did on TikTok.

Reels vs TikTok - A rundown