Most Popular Instagram Photos

Posted on 20th Mar 2013 @ 9:14 AM

                                                                                   Most Popular Instagram Photos

   2012 was the easily the year of Instagram. Soon after Facebook bought the 13-person company for $1 billion, the number of Instagram users skyrocketed past the 100 million mark.With 100 million-plus users on board, Instagram was loaded with tons of great photos taken all around the world. So the question: What makes people "like" a photo on Instagram? The best way to figure it out, perhaps, is to look at the most liked photo on Instagram.You would think it'd be easy to see the most liked photo ever on Instagram — a simple, raw statistic measuring pure id-driven popularity. It is not. Even browsing through the wealth of data collected by web-based Instagram services, like Webstagram, the most liked photo across the entire service is apparently a tricky thing to divine. There's no way to filter by likes, perhaps by design. Instagram's own popular page does "not simply count likes," and it's constantly churning through new pictures. Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez, the two most popular users on the service — with 1,285,752 and 1,233,238 followers, respectively — probably have the most likes. A fair suggestion. It's true of most of their photos, actually — the ones with the most likes tend to be the photos of the two together, or of themselves individually. So pure fame is still the straightest shot to popularity on the 30-million-user service, even though the general perception of Instagram — until it got bought by Facebook — was that it as this indie thing, where a certain kind of aesthetic or brilliant capture of an OMG moment might achieve a kind of triumphant popularity on its own merits in this rarefied little world. What are the self-portraits of Bieber and Gomez but icons of fame itself, after all, affirmed by their armies of likers? In that regard, perhaps the most interesting photo ever taken on Instagram is by Bieber. It's a photo of nothing. Literally. It's just a black square. But it picked up 15,277 likes and 900 comments: "Never give up" and "love u" and "This has got to be your best photo haha."