Instagram recently announced it has passed the coveted 1 billion user mark. It’s a mind-boggling number, but it’s unsurprising.

The platform is younger than sibling Facebook and has far less market saturation. Younger people are drawn to the network and are open-minded about receiving product recommendations from users. The combination of Millennial demographics, amenability to sales and a climbing user base is working well for those at the top of the network.

As a result of these factors, Instagram has seen a significant increase in spending on advertisements, and much of this is driven by video – over 65% of ad impressions come from video over static images. Just how fast is advertising growing on Instagram? Four times as fast as Facebook, at a rate of around 177% compared to this time last year. The data is showing that the increase is coming from both new advertisers and established brands that are strategically increasing their spend on the platform. There are some indications to say that these budgets are being redirected away from other networks like Facebook to capitalise on the richer feeding ground of Instagram, although some businesses budgets are increasing overall.

Advertisers are hitching their wagons to Instagram for other reasons, too. The platform distributes content that is far less controversial than Facebook which makes it a far safer bet, and the back-end team has rolled out plentiful improvements to the Ads service. The uptake of Instagram Stories has also proven a boon for advertisers. Campaigns are far simpler to structure than they were, and retailers are rewarding the platform with increased spending. There are also plenty of figures out there that demonstrate Instagram users are far more engaged with the platform than those on Facebook. Users interested in fashion and beauty are particularly highly engaged and motivated to spend on trends highlighted by influencers and traditional advertisers alike.

It’s a fruitful time for Instagram, and the increased spending on ads may be the result of an overall sweet spot in the company’s growth. Instagram is far less mature than Facebook and is likely experiencing growth in a way that mirrored the elder network’s astronomical figures of a few years ago.