 Hello everyone. I'm letting everybody in there so that we can all get started here properly and settle into tonight's conversation. Thank you all very much indeed for being here live and of course if you're watching the recording of this you're very welcome as well. Okay I see that there's still people coming in there so just while while you're all joining I'll just briefly introduce myself. So my name is Susan Hayes Colleton and I am the co-author of Positive Economics and that is the leading search economics textbook we work and have been published by EDCO and many of you may have found out about tonight as a result of perhaps being on EDCO's newsletter or being on our own positive economists newsletter or Twitter or Facebook or of course even Instagram like the title of tonight's session. What I'm intending to do throughout the series of webinars is to really highlight how economics comes to life but also in a very practical and academic way. So what I'm going to be talking about tonight is going to be focusing on the four factors of production and we're going to use the Instagram the app and I'm going to tell you a lot about Instagram in how it operates as that case study of the four factors of production but within that we're also going to talk about short and long run for example and we will also talk the law of diminishing marginal returns as well because all of those feature very much so in in Instagram story sorry to get it Instagram story I know I'm hilarious I know what's versus that I find my own job as well as to anybody else doing something. Okay so just to give you a super brief background on me personally so I started off being I start actually never studied economics at the leading search a lot of people don't know that I went on to study financial maths and economics in Galway and then went on to set up my first business and only company back in 2010 and then I co-wrote positive economics with Brian and Trudy my two co-authors who we went on to write the second book as well that was published in 2019. Separately I work with gratefully thousands of teenagers every year through our business savvy team academy and that is where we run transition work experiences for companies and organizations across the country and then separately I've also authored savvy woman's guide to making sorry savvy woman's guide to financial freedom savvy guide to make them on money and most recently the book that is now in all schools that was offered to all schools complimentary from edco and cfa Ireland and that is called money matters okay so at this stage I'd say yep we should all be here and good to go now please do of course put in any questions that you would like in the chat you can also put it into the questions and answers function if you're watching this on youtube afterwards you can put it in the comments and of course I have as I should always do if I'm going to be taking instagram as a case study I also have instagram open here my handle on instagram as you can imagine is Susan Hayes Colleton imagine that is as you might expect okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and I am going to take you through what we're going to focus on tonight so I'm going to start off with some facts about instagram okay so here we go I'll share my screen here okay so as you can see here we're going to focus on the four factors of production the chapters in particular that I'm going to refer to are going to be chapter four that are on the market economy where we introduce the concept of the factors production but in particular chapter six which focuses on costs and that you'll see various different screenshots that I've taken from the book but if you're following that following along is where I'm going to be coming from also the factors of production do very much tie into micro economics whereas what I'm going to be telling you of course is also going to factor in things like enterprise and entrepreneurship and as we look at how instagram developed its story I'm also going to be talking about employment and also really big trends that happen particularly in the consumer economy as well so there's a couple of touches there with macroeconomics but primarily tonight I just want to focus on my okay so here are a couple of fun facts and of course should any of you be preparing or well preparing to prepare for your economics project next year so if we've been in 50 years or indeed T-wise who might be here today and there is of course the leading certain amount project it's always important to have your sources so you'll see that everything that I'm showing you has a source this is called secondary research because it comes from some parents these aren't facts that I gathered myself I went and I found the source elsewhere as you can see for any one of you who will be either looking at the this afterwards where we send out the links all of the links that are in here or looking at this on YouTube afterwards you can see here you'll be able to click on the various different links as well so that means that if somebody wants to look up what you're showing them they can this is naturally very important if you're a practicing economist like me or if you are somebody who is putting together a thesis in university or if you're writing an article that might be published in a newspaper and all of those types of things of what economists do okay so over here on the left hand side you can see what my fun facts are whether Instagram fun facts there they're not mine so as you can see here nearly half of Instagram users say they use Instagram to shop weekly I would use Instagram quite a bit less so far less so than I use LinkedIn I would use Instagram more than I would probably I would certainly use Instagram less than I personally use Twitter I probably would have Instagram and Facebook on a par that would be being personally but as we take a look around the world you see how that compares so as you're going as we're going through these you might have to think about well what are you like what do you look at more the most liked photograph brought all on Instagram is a photo of an egg with almost 60 million likes which I find bizarre as I'm sure a lot of other people do too around three billion photos are shared on Instagram every day and of course that is the difference with the other social media platforms like if I think about LinkedIn LinkedIn for any of you who are not familiar with it is the social media platform for people who are in the workplace and so I'm that's where I spend most of my posting time and as you can imagine I run a company and it's important that we market our company to the people who are hopefully going to buy our services so we need to be wherever the the customers are any of you studying business you know that that's what marketing is all about but if I think about LinkedIn LinkedIn is really text and photograph driven also when I think let's say of something like Twitter yeah that's probably phone I naturally might use Twitter on my phone I certainly me personally I use probably I use LinkedIn balance between the desktop and the phone but definitely I only ever use Instagram on my phone for Instagram is a much more natively it is it is more so an app that you would use in your phone and secondly of course it is naturally for more so imagery what I don't want to specify yet is whether that's photos or a video because I want to talk you through Instagram's evolution and how it got to that point but three billion photos are shared on Instagram every day only 3.6% of Instagram accounts are verified and 50% of Instagram users use the explore page every month personally I'm not one of them but then again there's only one and two which is a lot but it's also not ever post with the location get 79% more engagement generally I would add those in alright now the hashtag I will come back to that a little bit later on I do certainly want to talk to you about the hashtags later on when we talk about the law of diminishing margin returns but post with the least one hashtag average 6% more engagement Twitter actually was where the hashtag began I use them quite a bit certainly I would encourage anybody to if you're going to look at the LC economics hashtag for example I use it on Twitter and just give you a quick shout out there if I go on to Twitter and I go into LC economics over here for example and of course I could do this as well on Instagram but I'm sure you're all there already so so if I now when I was tweeting today about tonight right there you go for example a superwoman here by the way Karla in the case she always is great great posts so you can see here and she put together a summary of the budget there on September 27th and that was me talking about a previous one of these and as you can see here there's also other yep this is one that I put out there on the hashtags well this was a competition from European movement Ireland and this is dear McCanning who also put up a poster with and QR codes for other resources this is one about money matters that I had put out there before and a range of others as you can see here Stephen Kinslow was talking about different events that were taking place now that was in March of last year around the morning webinar so hashtags of course I'm sure lots of you are familiar with them but a hashtag is a way in which to check in with a community and where a community of practice is already taking place as you can see here so posts with at least one hashtag average six percent more engagement and seven percent of women in the US use Instagram interestingly now I don't have this fact up here interestingly the percentage of people who use Instagram is actually slightly more male than female based on what I saw 52 percent of users of Instagram are male 48 percent are female based on a piece of research that I came across when I was researching for today so it is the most downloaded app in the world Tiktok comes in it's in second place followed by Facebook and WhatsApp and that is it has been around since 2010 that is an impressive spot in the download chart so it is the most downloaded app in the world again that probably doesn't come as a big surprise here because a lot of people who would have used Facebook at the beginning wouldn't necessarily have necessarily used it natively on their phone what I mean by natively is for a gun straight to the phone to download Facebook a lot of people would have been using that let's say on a laptop or on a desktop computer and bear in mind that I remember the year Facebook introduced video and it's it's certainly not that long ago I don't want to quote the year in case I'm wrong but I just want to make the point that Facebook in the earlier days again was quite text driven then photograph driven then video driven and now Facebook and Instagram have have slightly merged in their their capability when you look at the world's most used platform this actually surprised me and this came from Hootsuite again quoting you my source because this is secondary research and Facebook is actually number one 2.9 billion users and that is global so I think it is important to remember this certainly when I talk to the teenagers that I work with a lot of the maritime Facebook a lot of them would be more so on Instagram and Snapchat in particular and of course TikTok as well but I just found this interesting is actually Facebook leads the way at the moment based on the the research that I have here from Hootsuite which as you can see all of the sources are down here at the bottom that's followed by YouTube and after that then we have WhatsApp that's next now I'm an avid WhatsApp user I'm very very avid WhatsApp user indeed Instagram is next now WeChat I'm on WeChat as well WeChat is the well it's like the WhatsApp in China but it is far more than that so it's like WhatsApp and it's like Amazon on on the same app and it's like ordering a taxi on the same app like WeChat would be an app that does far more than what any social media would be it would also be e-commerce and a range of other things TikTok of course I don't have to introduce that to anybody the video app FPMessenger which I thought was quite high I've very very rarely used that and then as you can see there's there's also another one Snapchat relatively speaking in this from the global usage one of you is quite low like I say I would say as when it comes to Irish teenagers is from Maracay higher okay so moving on then from there now let's look at this from the context of the factors of production so like I mentioned here chapter 4 talks about the market economy and it's very much an introduction we just basically mentioned the factors of production there but in here there's there's far more so we looked at demand and supply respectively and concluded the price is the main factor in determining both and we referred to the point where demand and supply meet is equilibrium so that's where there's no tendency to change that is where demand and supply meet and generally the graph looks like that and here is where you have P and Q right price and quantity of that equilibrium so that we notice that utility or satisfaction is the base of demand and the cost of production is the base of supply it is these costs namely money that must be paid for the inputs to make something and what are those four things so there are four inputs we've land labor capital and enterprise so what I'm now going to do is take you through what the land is in the context of Instagram what is the labor I'm going to show you the change in employment I might surprise you with some of my statistics here capital I'm going to show you how much money how much capital that Instagram actually needed to grow and then when it was sold it was sold to Facebook and Facebook is now called meta and then finally also enterprise so what did the entrepreneurs do the two founders who set it up why did they set it up and then what do they sell it for which I will tell you about when do they leave when do they actually leave both of them are gone by the way from Instagram and also what I'm going to talk you through is the evolving nature of the business so what did when it came to entrepreneurial thinking what did actually change as time went on that's when we'll talk about the Instagram reels we'll talk about stories and where all that came came about okay land the picture on the right there is Instagram's HQ it is in all mountain view in California and that is I've been there no not at Instagram's HQ I haven't been to there but I've been to Mountain View California and of course Mountain View California is in Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley is in between San Francisco and San Jose in and I'm doing this because I'm one north and one south and Silicon Valley is about an hour's drive I've driven it and it is like it's basically a road it's a road but Silicon Valley itself is more so an area and then of course that is where a lot of companies that we know are headquartered globally so whether that's Facebook meta now and Twitter and Microsoft is actually in Seattle a lot of the tech companies who you might be familiar with their their base there sorry that this picture is coming from that so what is the land ultimately that Instagram has well of course as you can imagine first of all those buildings that's always the obvious one right the actual land that they're built up is is the land that Instagram needed it began with two people and just very briefly to tell you how it began is two people I'll tell you their names and well two people decided to come together and create this app where you could share your location now nobody would do that today the reason is nobody would do that today is right now I can do a drop pin and google maps and I can send it to you I could share my live location on whatsapp of course facebook also owns that and I can send it to you like there is there is there's snapchat as you know has a geolocation feature as well so if I was to say right I'm going to create an app today I'm hoping people will use it and then share their location and then we'll generate advertising based on that location I wouldn't be going anywhere because it's already been done and well well well done at this stage so that's where it began and but when they did that when they start off with that what the one of the partners like the romantic partners of one of the co-founders said they didn't like they were using an iphone 4 they said that the photo sharing capability of the app and they were only determining whether they would use photos they just said it wasn't good enough and it could have been better for the phone and then instagram was born so when the two founders started up of course they wouldn't have had the buildings that are out in mountain view now but they do today now this is the one of course that I wanted to come over to in particular is that when it comes to land and we think about that in the context of economics we also think about like the physical infrastructure that goes in to making things happen and of course that's different to capital I'm going to talk to about capital as well but the servers in the data center is what's very very important this is what creates the ability for me to put up a picture right now I could take a picture of me delivering this live here this evening and I could put it up on instagram straight away you would have it as fast as I put as soon as it's posted you could have it so the photograph isn't actually sitting in my phone the photographs in the cloud where is the cloud well it's overhead but ultimately that picture is stored in the data center and how you or I have access to it is through data it's through 4g 4g is what I have here beside me anyway that is what's there so as a result the servers in the data centers that is what actually stores all of the actual data that you and I can access and then of course the other thing is the devices right is that we do need for you and me to be able to interact with instagram we need a device so when it comes to the physical infrastructure that makes instagram happen it's not and let me be very clear about this with a very different example and then I come back to it I have a glass of water here beside me let's say that I made glasses right so I'm a manufacturer glass manufacturer and I make glasses right so we we produce glasses and then we put them into super value we put them into most grace put them into don'ts we sell them IKEA home store and more etc if you bought those glasses that's then you buy the glasses you buy the economic goods and off you go and you use them you see the thing is with instagram it's different is that all of us as users of instagram we are the product we are creating the product for them by me putting up a picture up on instagram that is me creating something for somebody else to look at by me creating a story with a sticker out that is me again creating an interaction for them it is creating something for you to engage with for let's say christian christiana rinaldo one of the most influential influencers on instagram when he hosts a reel then he is creating that so the point I'm trying to make is that in comparison to this my company let's say it was producing glasses and then you sell them I sell them to you you have no role in actually the production of the product in instagram's case we're all involved in instagram we are the product we are providing them with the inventory or the product that they then go on sale and what they sell is our attention and our interaction and of course they will also do that according to that the week fight so if I put up a post on instagram which of course I could write now but I'm not going to do it because I'm here with you I take a picture of me delivering this this session live right now and then I put it up on instagram then I and I say that I'm based currently I'm here in Dublin so I'm sharing my location I'm sharing my interest in economics I'm sharing and let's say particularly if I was to fill in the hashtag lc economics think about all of the information that I'm giving instagram and then instagram can use this algorithm then to try to sell me economics courses or economic revision courses or economic conferences in Budapest just coming off the top of my head now so therefore of course the ability to do that means that I need to have a device so also and of course instagram doesn't provide all all of us with devices it provides us with an app that's free to download so land in the case of instagram consists of buildings servers and data centers and also the devices that we use in order to engage with them that's the physical physical things the physical architecture that makes this up now labour I want to be very careful with you on my source for this and the reason for this is that I searched a number of times for the number of people that work in instagram and I got all sorts of numbers I got this one and this is the one that I got most often I got over a thousand employees I got 5000 employees remember instagram is owned by facebook so therefore it's not an independent business that stands on its own two feet that publishes its own stock analysis report where I would have gotten that data instead of course instagram is swallowed into that company and that's what makes it hard for me to get a load of other figures I can get for you no problem and I have them for you but not this one so I do want to just point out again you can see my source so if you want to go and check that out you can and this is the figure that it quoted is that instagram recent data revealed that instagram is 450 employees personally I think it is probably higher but since I wanted to I wanted to get a source here that you could rely on I would say this recent data probably refers more so to a 2022 figure but let's stick with what we've got and these employees service social media platforms more than 1.3 billion active monthly users that of course is now higher as well this seems like a small number of employees when compared to facebook's more than 58600 employees who service facebook's nearly 3 billion users and twitter has 6600 employees for what's one third of monthly users of instagram so let me just explain a couple of things here number one I might surprise you with this instagram was sold and I remember it being sold instagram was sold to facebook in 2014 for a billion euro one billion dollars between stock and cash one billion dollars there was 13 staff one three 13 staff built a business that was so focused on strong technology that could handle scope and scale through the data centers and on the engagement and everything I mentioned you earlier that was sold for one billion dollars and there was 13 staff 13 staff I've often thought about that as a business owner myself is to think how how would you get to that scale with 13 staff but anyway they did now moving on from there as you can see there's an awful lot more staff there now and also facebook instagram is worth a lot a lot more money now than a billion euro but let's just think about like who are we talking about well first of all when it comes to to labor we'll often think of staff first of all right the people are actually full-time employed now if any of you have been following the news over the past while you will know particularly in 2023 in particular and this started in 2022 but in 2023 in particular there's been a lot of tech layouts so I want to reinforce one point the information that I have on the right hand side is probably not the most recent and therefore it's probably not as accurate as it should be you then you say to me okay but Susan why did you put it there the reason that I put it there is to point out the difference in the number of staff that instagram have relative to the others so why the numbers may be changed now because of two reasons one is the goals of the businesses and two is because of the layoffs that have happened at an employment level I still want to point out there's a really big difference between instagram's number of staff versus facebook and twitters and the others as well okay that's the only point I wanted to make and also of course you can see here I'm directing you back to the source where you can interrogate that now if today's webinar was an update on instagram's business I wouldn't have used those figures today's today's webinar is focusing on the factors of production and understanding economies of scale and other economic topics that's why I'm quoting this secondly companies as well like instagram often have a lot of contractors so for example microsoft could be a client of mine right microsoft could be a client of mine where microsoft says okay will you come in and run our transition your work experience program or for example at johnson and johnson is applying to ours we run their their transition your work experience program we're a contractor so yes I me personally I could be on the site today working for that company but I'm not staff I'm not staff we're brought in as a contractor so you think about all the types of contractors that would work in these companies cleaners the catering company people who lead work experiences there graphic designers who might be outsourced event managers all of those types of services would all be contracted in as well all of that feeds into the labor that goes into a company like instagram but then of course this is also what makes instagram's business model a little bit different is that think about who really draws people to instagram influencers influencers do and of course I could if you wanted I could go off and I could find the various different influencers who I might who who share updates on instagram now what is an influencer so a nano influencer so nano is is like a it's a word that implies very very small so a nano influencer would have between 500 and 5000 followers for example and then often there we get to all sorts of other influencers so again i'm back to christiano Ronaldo or we might think of the Kardashians or we could animate you know yourselves who the influencers are ultimately they work for instagram not instagram doesn't pay them they call the brands who represent who they want to the brands who want to gain exposure to their respective followers actually pay them but one way or the other unless there were influencers but then instagram wouldn't be as big as it is it wouldn't be as engaging as it is you wouldn't look at it as often as you do if the influencers weren't there and on the other hand there's no point in influencers posting if you don't have yours ultimately by you scrolling down through your instagram feed let's say every day and every people generally look the daily active users would be very very high so unless you actually look at instagram and of course there's no point in the influencers posting and instagram wouldn't have the business so you too work without being paid for instagram how you are being paid ultimately or the reward that you're ultimately getting is you're getting a free app all of the content that is there is there for free so if i do a really and i talk about the four factors of production and i do three minutes on explaining them using instagram as a case study and then you can get that content for free you can see Cristiano Ronaldo talking about his you know top five moments in the work up you can see Kim Kardashian talking about how to or all the makeup tutorials that's there or the dance routines that are there or the free food videos that are there all of those of course you get for free so that is that is the that is the reward ultimately but all of those are ultimately what make up the labour that goes into making instagram is success okay let's go on again now capital how much money did instagram need in order to get to where it is today well started off here 6th of october 2010 the seed round now seed i am seed um i'm sorry there's a lot of words there that sound the same i was the master of ceremonies or i was the host i was the interviewer at the recent venture capital conference in Ireland it was run by intraclade Ireland which is the body responsible for north south trade across the country it was set up as a result of good Friday agreement almost 25 years ago as you know we're heading for that anniversary now shortly and during that conference i interviewed a range of people who had raised money and i also talked to people who had sold businesses i talked to people who had put their business on the stock market and various other things like that in essence that is when when you raise money in that context venture capital means that let's say i was the founder of instagram what i would do is that i would go to you and i would say i have this idea i think it can be amazing i think we can have massive reach i think we can make a lot of money i just need money to get started if i borrow the money now from the bank i don't think i'm going to be able to repay it fast enough because it might take a lot of time for us to make that money but when we do make that money i think we'd be able to make a lot so how about this i sell you part of the company and you give me money for that and what you get as part of the company is you get the opportunity then to get some of the profits as we go on as a dividend or alternatively if we then go on and sell the company in a later date which instagram did then you and we we sell for a higher amount than than it's worth now you'll you'll be able to profit that way so seed round is what you do to get going to start off series a is what you do next then to take the business to the next level series b is what happens after that and then you can go all the way down the alphabet so on the 6th of october 2010 instagram raised half a million half a million and you know what else they raised that two weeks now i don't know when they actually started like started properly but in two weeks they raised half a million and four months later four five months later february the second 2011 they raised seven million seven a million seven million was what they raised series a it was what they raised and the number of investors at the time as you can see there were five so there was five investors that they that contributed seven million 14 months later from the second of february 2011 to the 50th of april 2012 they then raised 50 million six investors and i have all the details on the investors who they were if you're interested you click on that link and you can go and you can find them but the point i'm making is is that that's the amount of money that there is there is 50 million dollars to continue building the business this shows massive interest on the part of investors and a huge belief in what the company could do of course it didn't take long for those investors to get a lot of money back so let's talk about the short run and the long run because i'm now going to be moving into the factor of enterprise when it comes to entrepreneurial thinking what was going on here what did the business do how did it succeed but then how did it grow and develop as well now as you as a lot of you know there's two time periods short and long there's the short run and the long run so a period of time during which at least one factor of production is fixed in supply so that's the short run and the long run is when every factor can change so as you can see over here i and i came up with the picture brief for the artist between hillary's deli as you can see here the difference in the short run and the long run and the point of this picture is is that if there are loads and loads and loads of people who are flying in the door looking for the products that hillary's hillary's deli is offering well then of course then people have to stand in a queue because you can't get stuff fast enough or you can't expand fast enough you can't raise money fast enough and also the entrepreneur just can't come up with no ideas fast enough in order to be able to deal with it so what do they do well they say okay well what's the easiest thing we could do here do you know what we'll do let's put more money into our infrastructure and let's enable people to be able to buy and pay online so that then that would speed up the queue that's changing one factor production or let's take on another staff member if we can take on another staff member well then at least we can speed up how quickly we can serve customers right let's queue whereas in the long run you can do everything you can go to the bank and you can raise you can borrow two hundred and fifty thousand you can double the size of the building you can take on five more staff you can come up with five new marketing ideas to bring in more business as well in the long run you can everything and the short run and the long run the difference here is not time it's how quickly you can adjust your factors of production so the time period just to read through this the time period is involved in each devolution vary in terms of months of years and industry to industry so popular daily that uses capital and labour like the building in the kitchen etc equipment and staff and is constantly busy will not be able to expand this premises immediately in response to an increase in demand so instead they have to buy planning permission to go see about contractors and building the extension all that takes time so the premises of the capital is fixed in supply and the only method as you as I mentioned in my example might be take on more staff or something else like that but in the long run everything is very in the long run all factors are very the time period for the daily to increase in size a short run time period and contrasts this to a car manufacturer for the corresponding time period might be several years so let's think about this let's think about instagram in the short and the long one right in the short run there is more money months apart they went from taking in half a million to seven million five months apart so that that half a million I'd say it was spent very very very very quickly so this is something they could do in the short term do you honestly think that they built the building that I showed you in the short run no and then of course to go from 13 staff when they sold the company in 2014 up to the number that it is today that also of course takes time as well so let me now take you through the entrepreneurial journey look at the enterprise factor production so in october 2010 as you saw the money was raised the half a million in two weeks and there as you can see instagram was launched by kevin system and mike crater by december so that was just two months afterwards instagram had already reached one million registered users now as you know the numbers are a lot higher today but in two months it had one million users that is what made this really interesting if you can show you can get to a million users in that period of time investors are likely to be very interested and of course then that's when they went on to raise their seven million now in april sorry it was 2012 apologies thought it was 2014 it was 2012 do you know what i'm confusing with what's up so in 2012 april um facebook was acquired acquired instagram for a billion dollars in cash and stock and then as of january 2013 it had 100 million active users now you think about the data servers that would have needed to be able to handle to go from a million to one million that is and remember as well when you're going down through instagram it's constantly updating constantly constantly constantly updating you need some serious technology that can do that at scale drawing huge huge numbers of people who are using it but also as i remember this is going out all over the world then by june 2018 so it took five years then to grow tenfold again and by june 2018 instagram had reached one billion monthly active users so what do you need and let's not go any further for a moment as an entrepreneur what do you need here well you need ways in which to make this different you need and and the way in which you made a difference is number one it was natively designed around photographs number two it was natively designed to be used on the phone and then of course there was all the hashtags were used and there was a range of other things that happened no not even getting on to the stuff that i'm talking about here yet but it was all about sharing pictures if you i don't know if any of you remember this but at the time flicker fli ck r and pinterest were growing roundabout at the same speed back back then but then instagram is really the one that seems to have taken over now instagram most followed account as of september 2021 uh is at instagram with over 400 million followers now let's just take a look at that so instagram now has this you know has okay where are we at instagram now has 621 million followers so what does it need to do in order to to make that happen well of course do have a lot of engaging content as far as i'm aware and i don't know if i'm a hundred percent accurate in this but i do know that this did happen i just don't know if it was the only one that happened instagram or when it came to the instagram story which i'll talk about in a moment of when that was introduced is he wheels is the only Irish company if that if i'm right i think is the only an instagram account in Ireland that has been featured as an instagram story by instagram itself story by instagram if i'm correct i think it's the only one if it's not the only one it's the first one uh yeah this one over here so exciting news the easy queen sisters easy and albert are going to be feature story on the official instagram page so it's an honor to mention that was when 260 weeks ago so that's 2017 right so maybe maybe they weren't the only one but i think they were the first one but i do remember i because i remember i i've interviewed them i've interviewed the sisters and they that was one of the points that that they made is that easy means i'm pretty sure so it must be the first one if not the only one but they were featured and on instagram's actual story themselves so also i also mentioned about the aq but this is the one that i just want to talk to you about over here right so if you just let me just zoom in here so when it comes to the developments that instagram has had over the years it introduced instagram stories in 2016 so as and we know snapchat has really built their model around that but instagram stories is where you can put up a story and then it disappears after 24 hours unless you make it part of your highlights and on your story you can have a range of stickers as well i use them a lot for question stickers when i'm asking my audience something i also use them for polling i use them for quizzes i use i think instagram stories are very useful and then we had ig tv in 2018 and ig tv is instagram tv where then you could go live and i've often used this for particularly more so our clients when for example we have a client in the states that is focusing on stock analysis it's called vector vest and i've often when i've been on site with them either in the states or at a at a show teaching people about investing i'll often open up ig tv live and i will have i'll do a quick video all around maybe how to understand a dividend some of you would have under would have been working on dividends for example dividend g's or pe ratios in accounting but they also apply very much as well to when you're working with this from a business point of view i might use them then and then of course reels so reels were introduced in 2020 reels for anybody that just know a reel is when you can put a collection of pictures together our collection of videos together i really like them huh again there we go i really like them i i have to say i really like them and that is also more and more of our people are actually sending their attention is is on engaging with reels as well i find that they're a great way to create a second selection of memories and we did one particularly i i did a finance retreat with the company in dupai a little while ago um month ago in fact and our reel for example is not there to be seen now okay well anyway yeah that isn't quite there to be seen now all right it's somewhere it's all yes i don't actually know exactly where it is anyway i don't want to take up take up your time and in looking for it but so a reel is when you when you put a collection of a collection of images or videos together there and also there is a range of templates firstly i don't use the templates but i do use i put together my own reels and also what instagram is where i got it doing is suggesting how you can fit all of those together so as you my point here is that instagram's on enterprise has had to evolve from from this point here if i was to just you know bounce between between the different boxes what you need here are two things you need money and you need marketing and perhaps one would have ledged to the other you would have needed money for the development you probably wouldn't need an awful lot of wages for these two co-founders to start off at the time but they definitely would have needed money and marketing and that's what would have got them to one million registered users and of course then they would have needed more money but also they would have needed more marketing again in order to be able to to be able to get to the number of users that that they had by the time you're getting over here to january 2013 you need a lot of investment technology the land the ability to actually serve customers and and bringing in more staff but bringing a lot of investment into the hardware into the software into the staff into the into the building etc that's what you would have needed over here you would have needed to scale even more of that both marketing money staff and also of course the engagement in with facebook as it was then at the time by the time you get over here you need innovation you need to come up with new ideas and of course the new ideas are the instagram stories i g tv reels etc okay so i've already shown you that so i just now just want to bring you on to this and this is what i actually got from meta's meta of course is parent company now facebook has changed its name to meta short for metaverse and the metaverse is something i'm watching with intrigue i have to say that is probably something i'll be talking to you about in a webinar at some stage as well but we'll leave that for now and i just want to i just picked this up here i was reading through the earnings reports that came out from meta and it was last december and it was in february but the the report was in february but the detail was the last quarter of meta's earnings so that's that's where it's coming from published in february arising from december and i just want to i just read it out to oh let's read it out to you here and i don't seem to be able to do that okay let me just scroll back in so it says first let's talk about our ai discovery engine facebook and instagram are shifting from being organized solely around people and accounts you follow to increasingly showing more relevant content recommended by our ai systems ai of course is artificial intelligence and this covers every content format which is something that makes our services unique but we're especially focused on short term videos since reels is growing so quickly and that's why i wanted to direct your focus towards that i'm the person who's talking talking here is Mark Zuckerberg so yo i'm really proud of our progress here reels play across facebook and instagram have more than doubled over the past year with the social component of people resharing reels has gone even faster and has more than doubled on both apps in just the last six months like i say i remember attending a seminar uh that facebook gave and when they were talking about video was introduced one year i don't quote the year in case i'm wrong but what i do remember them saying was that it then within that year became 40 percent of the content uploaded so the speed here at which innovation needs to be factored in is pretty fast okay so um now i just wanted to also touch on the law of diminishing margin returns right so i'm just going to touch on that because i know we are coming to the end of our session and first first of all like i said the business model how instagram actually works the business model is through advertising i don't pay to download and to gain access to the content on instagram i am the content that other people are paying for other either other people are looking to engage with what i'm there or else there are companies who are seeking to sell to me and ultimately they are paying for my attention this is the demographic so um 17.1 percent of men between 18 to 24 years are on instagram and this is the share of instagram's advertising audience by age group and gender now if i am correct i am pretty sure this is global as well if i'm correct i think this is global as well 13 to 17 4.7 male 4 percent of females and then when it gets to 25 to 34 years old as well then we have obviously a female and male and then it starts to decline after that so that is share of instagram's advertising audience so when businesses are trying to target this particular age group you can now see where where that money is going and where it's chasing of course the engagement level for instagram is very high around these age groups and that's that's naturally why that happens okay now i also just wanted to talk about economies of scale so we talk about economies of scale and in in the book we talk about and we talk about internal and external economies of scale and we talk about this economies of scale as well this is just one statistic that i found again um you can see my sources over here i just think it's very interesting to see that in 2022 last year instagram generated an estimated 51.4 billion revenue that's gross money that it took in mostly in advertising and that accounts for almost 45 percent facebook store to revenue now if i was right with my 450 staff or if it's more accurately a thousand even if it's more accurately five thousand look at the amount of people that instagram employs relative to facebook massive difference also facebook bought instagram for a billion dollars just over a decade ago now look at what it's generating on an annual basis that is what you call economies of scale by the company actually buying in something that is huge engagement from a specific cohort of people where the people who are there are willing to buy come back and re-engage all the time and also send real well now send reads on to their friends or have highlights of stories or sorry have stories or story highlights etc because of that you can now see that facebook achieved a huge amount of growth as a result of instagram that is ultimately economies of scale so finally moving on then finally to the law of diminishing margin returns again i came up with the design brief for this cartoon if you ever want to know anything about anything that is in the book ask me i will tell you the three of us wrote the book and we all had different different aspects so there's certain chapters that i want to put more influence on not this one brought this was brian's chapter brian he wrote he wrote the cost chapter and then what happens when you work with co-authors is then another person edits and then another person edits and then oh on and on and on we go but and i i've told you in previous webinars of particular ones that i started out writing the one with the financial sector was all me that has me written literally all over the international trade chapter that was truly chapter all over and then as i say we apply our own layer to it but i was the one that often wrote the design briefs and this was one that i just wanted hillary to hands coming out of her everywhere and she was doing all sorts of things she was making she was making the ham rolls she was taking money she was making the coffee she was doing the accounts she was trying to figure out what she was going to do next she was organizing packaging and this was what the designer came back with so just wanted to give you a quick note on that but what is the law of diminishing margin returns well that is when when you start when you add something what if you what if you add loads and loads and loads and loads and loads of money to a business well if there's nothing to spend on it's no good to you might say oh Susan there's something to spend on not really because let's say that that i have 100 million in my bank account right now and i work and i own hillary's deli and there's space for like 10 people in the shop and two of them are staff what good is the 100 million to me because if the shop is already full of customers i can only have two staff well then the only thing that i can do is expand and let's say i don't want to expand well then the money is no good to me similarly let's say that i'm in the same same situation and i have 1000 euros in the bank and i'd say okay do you know what i'm going to do is i'm going to take on a staff member and i'm going to probably i'll probably get no maybe i might get a a week or two weeks out of that person but i'll take in enough money as over those two weeks if i took on another person and then i realize sure wherever they stand wherever they work all i would be doing is paying out money to people and they'd be falling over each other so the thing is is that the law diminishing margin returns means that if you keep on adding something you actually don't get any further or worse is that you actually prevent workers from happening if i if i own hillary's deli we sit with 10 tables we've enough for two staff and me and then let's say i hire three more people well then everyone's going to get in each other's way and people stand behind the counter people taking orders people other taking orders sorry i'm into and sorry sorry coffee's being spilled someone else's oh and so the law of diminishing margin returns is if you keep on adding in fact the production then the benefit stops happening it first of all it slows down the benefit slows down the pace it slows down to the point of where it can go the other way where it's actually needed so as you can see here in our text we say suppose that hillary's the sole employee hillary's responsible for ordering supplies making the produce serving customers enjoying the premises clean regardless of how hard hillary works and i know what it feels like to be hillary someone who has ran my own business for over 12 years and i remember when we didn't have staff i was hillary regardless of how hard hillary works it does not take long to realize that extra help would be beneficial for profitable so hillary hires the assistant john and the production in at the deli rises then she goes on and she takes on andrew and then angela and then very soon hillary isn't going to be able to make much more difference to the place unless she expands etc so how is this relevant for instagram well here's my last example of the night hashtags and that was the creator's account on instagram what they did was they recommended this number down here and that was three to five hashtags you can put up to 30 hashtags on a post on instagram however this says and this was their own recommendation is that you would only put in up to three to five knock up as far as 30 because after that people just stop and the work that goes into which hashtag should i put in which one should i choose to add in make sure that they're right and then reacting to them and all that sort of thing so what they're saying is keeping the number of hashtags between three to five then they have a whole lot of other dooms there for people who work in marketing and who use instagram as a primary area of their business so this is the law of diminishing margin returns and action is that the more hashtags that you put in not to say that you get any better as a result so of course as you can imagine the last slide that i have is this one which is of course if you would like to either connect in with me of course feel free to do so again i'm at susan his colleague and very happy to hear from any of you if any of you ever any questions or anything of course please feel free to send medium i post about all sorts of things and this one over here is from money matters and this one over here is when i was emceeing a conference a couple of weeks ago in belfast but i often talk about various other different things along with the lines of as you will see particularly i go for breakfast every morning i think over breakfast every morning and and i talk with that in my foodie spots because of course that's what instagram is for and i use a range of other social media but in particular if anybody does want to connect you and be there you are most welcome so i'm going to stop sharing i'm going to go back there and just check i don't see that we have any questions or that we have any chat in there that's no problem at all and what i'm going to do is as i always do is that we will be putting a blog post up on the positive economist then we will be following up of course i'm guessing that everybody who is here tonight has registered through zoom and so you will automatically get this recording and the associated resources and the blog post if you are watching this on youtube and we're going with the link is in the is in the description about how you can register for a newsletter so that then you get the same and also that's how you can be updated about future webinars as well our next one is taking place in a couple of weeks time you'll all be updated and you will be updated about that both to ourselves and if you're on the ed commanding list you will be updated there too but to each and every one of you thank you very very much for being here i appreciate it i hope that tonight was useful so that you have a sense of how instagram really is an example of factors of production and i wish you all the very best in all that you do you can tell us bye