Transcription
Three of the top priorities for us are valuing original content, helping smaller creators break out, and also having trends just happen quickly.
It makes sense. In terms of helping smaller creators, something a lot of people have noticed recently is the pie chart of where their reach is coming from is really increased in terms of the disconnected or the unconnected reach, as you call it—the reach from non-followers.
I'm curious what motivated that change—trying to grow the pie.
Yeah, so basically, if you look at how people share on Instagram, creators aside for a second, there are more photos and videos, not including text, shared in DMs than there are in stories every day. And there are way more photos and videos shared into stories than into feed every day. So, yes, feed is for average folk to share photos or videos that they're really proud of, but it's a very small percentage of average folk who actually post a feed post in a given day, whereas for creators, it's much higher. So it's becoming much more of a public domain, whereas stories and DMs are much more about where your friends are, though obviously creators are in all of those places in different ways. But because the amount of content being shared into feed was decreasing for a long time, we've needed to figure out a way to—that meant that the amount of time people were spending in feed was decreasing, and so that was a negative feedback loop. Because there's less time being spent, there's less reach to go around; there's less people like and comment less, then people post less, and then there's less content to see. So then people spend less time, and they like and comment less, and it was going in a circle. So recommendations was really just an—the only viable way to maintain feed as an important place.
Gotcha. And it is the most important place for creators to post. Stories are awesome, but your average creator reaches way more people in feed.
Mhm. And so recommendations was a way to, from a just pure brass tacks business perspective, maintain feed and grow feed as an important part of Instagram, and we try to do so in a way where it would help people discover creators and other accounts that they would love but might not even knew existed.
Um, and so you've seen that play out, and you've seen I made it—I pushed really hard to make sure people could see the difference between their connected and unconnected reach.
MH. Because they should know where it's coming from and what to optimize for, you know, might be different, or how to think about it might be different. So it was a—it was a business need and then a user need, and we tried to—that's what we're always trying to do is figure out something that's not only good for creators but also good for average folk and also good for Instagram, and then, you know, at the overlap is where the good stuff happens.
People are always freaking out over algorithm changes and updating. There's this new algorithm. You answered recently on one of your Friday Ask Me Anything, which are awesome. Um, you said that you're constantly tweaking and working on the algorithm, but oftentimes in small ways that we might not even notice. Is that a daily thing that it's being tweaked and worked on?
Gotcha. Small changes go out every day.
Gotcha. It's very rare that there's a massive change in how we do something. It's much more common that we're just trying to get a little bit better one day at a time.
Gotcha. Um, if you see a huge swing in what's going on, it probably isn't—there was a huge change in how we rank content; it's probably more—there was a huge change in the world.
Gotcha. It might be, you know, Mother's Day; everybody's posting pictures of their moms, talking about how much they love them. That's actually content for you to compete with as a creator. Um, or there's seasonality, you know, like if you have predominantly young people who follow you and schools out, you know, you see time spent on social media is going to grow. Um, holidays, same thing. Um, if people are off work, you know, they're going to spend more time online. So if there's a big swing in a given day, um, it's probably more likely the world changed. Um, but also the thing—think one piece of advice I give a lot that I don't know I'm good at giving is don't overreact to any one post because something might have been weird that day. Look for the patterns. So for—for these types of posts, how do they do? For this other type of post, how do they do? And then, you know, double down on what works and maybe rethink what doesn't.
Talking about messaging, which I know you believe is a central part of the platform, and I would agree that it's one of the real strong suits that Instagram has over other platforms. Um, there's been a lot of mixed messaging—no pun intended—around DMs recently, and specifically DM automation. Um, so I'd love if you could clear the air about automation through approved partners, obviously, and whether that's allowed on Instagram or, you know, specifically the whole, "If you comment this word, you'll receive this automated message."
Oh, interesting. So I think it depends. So we certainly—we have an API; it's—it's allowed. Um, but sometimes there are some providers that are doing shady things. So like one thing is like don't ever give anybody your password. If anybody's asking you for your password, like that's not probably like a trusted partner.
Yeah. But actually, most accounts that are compromised—so that are self-compromised—last time I checked. Um, so that happens a lot. Um, so we do want to support this part of the ecosystem; we know it's important, uh, but make sure you are working with someone who's reputable. Uh, it's possible sometimes we mistakenly catch good actors when we're trying to catch bad actors. I'm sure that happens. Um, but yes, there—there are APIs; there are tools that are supported and allowed.
Gotcha. Okay. Um, in terms of SEO on Instagram, um, it seems like you guys are really working to improve the discoverability of profiles and posts. Um, can you talk more about the future of how Instagram might work as—as a search engine, showing us what we're looking for and having Instagram results pop up when we are searching for things?
So I mean, two different sides. One, yes, we're trying to do better at helping—at having content from creators on Instagram surface in search results for, you know, Google and other search providers, um, because I just think that's a win-win for everybody. So we're starting to try to figure out what the opportunities are there. That team has been doing—has been lean and mean and mighty for a long time, um, but they're doing some good work. Um, but we're also starting to invest more in search on Instagram, um, because there's so much amazing content, and quite frankly, what we call content search—search as opposed to searching for an account—actually searching for some type of content, it's not very good on Instagram. Uh, and that's not a knock on that team; that team has been really small for a very long time. So we've strengthened that team recently, and I'm pretty excited about some of the ideas, um, that will hopefully—and improvements that are going to go out over the next—well, next few months and few years. Um, it's a long road, um, but I do think that could also be really good—one for people who are looking for things. You can imagine whatever you use Instagram for; it'd be great to be able to find that more easily, but also for creators because it should allow content to resurface so that you don't kind of get all the value in those first 24-48 hours. Um, but we'll see.
Gotcha. One thing—one of those little features that might be—that something that that team worked on that I noticed recently was at the top of the comments section; there was a recommended search.
Yeah. Um, can you tell me more about that feature and what determines what that recommended search is?
So we're working on it. Actually, the latest version is not out yet. Um, but what we're looking at is both the—the content—so the—the reel or the carousel or the photo—but what we also need to look at is the comments below. Okay? Because sometimes—and that's not out yet, but I think that's coming out—sometimes where the real interesting context is is not in the piece of—not in the video that someone uploaded but in the context around it, which is—is almost always in the comments. And so what we're trying to do is, you know, surface that more easily, um, and then you can go and find out more. So if you saw, I don't know, Walton Goggins' face and—uh, not Severance—White Lotus this week was like a big meme. Yeah, you could—maybe you see that—maybe you haven't—maybe you don't watch the show, and there's a picture or a reel of that, and you'd be like, "Why—why does this guy look so confused?" Yeah. Uh, but in the comments you might find, you know, the context between this crazy Sam Rockwell sort of monologue in this barn in a hotel in Bangkok or whatever it was, and then that might be—it might—this—the prompt might be something like, you know, I don't know, you know, "White Lotus episode 7" or whatever it was, and so then it would give you context, and then if you clicked on that you might get a whole bunch of other content that put it in context.
Gotcha. Uh, our hope is to sort of create a little bit of fun and delight by connecting the dots, right? Because the reel might be funny on its own, or the meme—the comments might be good to read if you've got time; you may or may not search for it, but if we can connect the dots, all of a sudden, you know, maybe one plus one plus one can equal four instead of three.
Gotcha. Um, so I know you said comments are coming soon. Right now it's primarily looking at the content itself. So does that mean the caption, the spoken audio, the actual like analyzing of what is in the video—all of that—all of those things are considered?
But this—the technology we're using to actually understand those things is going to get much better over the next couple months. So—so the way this works for any provider is—you know, this is to other platforms too—is you don't actually—you basically take key frames from the video, so you might look at 16 or 128 or even as many as, you know, I think—I think YouTube is probably more like up to like 512 different frames from the video to try to understand that—what happened. You also will transcribe the audio into text, um, and then try to—use that and extract any understanding from that. Um, comments—coming soon, if not already out. And then from all of that you try to come up with a—a search that might be interesting, and we try—and if we don't come up with anything we think that's interesting, we just don't show you the prompt.
Sure. Um, so what you'll see is those prompts will get more—they'll happen more often as we get better at understanding content, um, and context, and then—and we're more confident in the recommendation.
Makes sense. I think it's very helpful for creators to know that it's everything—it's all of those things.
Yeah, yeah. Uh, to be aware of. Yeah, and it's going to be like—right now it's disproportionately looking at the caption relative to the video relative to the audio relative to the comments in that order, but that's going to change because as we get better at understanding all the pieces we'll integrate them. Um, so definitely just assume we're trying to understand the full context, um, because that's—that's where we're going; that's what we're working on.
Gotcha. You've talked about kind of the three metrics that are best or that you would recommend focusing on the most for increasing reach. What do you tell people when they ask you what to focus on?
Shares. Yeah, because I think shares—at least algorithmically speaking—of course they're helpful, but it's sending a post to another human. So even if the algorithm was optimized for saves, a share would still be the way to reach another human being.
Yeah, that's how I think about it. But speaking of this conversation of shares—of course, human to human—all shares are not equal. If I send a post to my wife, that's one additional viewer. If I share it to my story, that might be hundreds or thousands of extra viewers. Algorithmically speaking, are all shares created equally, or are different shares weighted more heavily?
Oh, that's a really good question. I—I—I think they're valued relatively equally, um, because it's true that like if you send a message to one person, there's less views than if you send it to your stories and maybe thousands of people are going to see your story.
MH. Um, but they might have seen your other stories that day anyway, and your wife might not have opened Instagram that day, and when you send her a message, her phone's going to bing, and she's going to open it up most likely—hopefully.
I don't know. Yeah. Um, and but also because if you just think about it from a—from a—from the perspective of the—of the person receiving it, like it's kind of more meaningful if you send me something—you're like, "I think you'd be really interested in this." That is a lot more meaningful than, "I thought everyone might want to know this thing in addition to all the other things I thought they all should know today."
Yeah, yeah. Um, so we look more—it sends—gotcha. Um, and then the third metric, if you will, has to do with the time—the amount of time people are spending with the content.
Yeah. I want first of all clarification—it's watch time, so the amount of seconds that people are spending with that piece of content, not necessarily watch rate. Watch—be correct—watch rate being the percent that you watch.
Yeah, the percentage of completion. We look at both, um, but we—we try not to—we look at both because if you watch something all the way to the end, that's a good sign, but we definitely don't want to just, you know, penalize things because they're longer. Okay? And so, you know, if you watch 20 seconds of a 21-second video and 20 seconds of a, you know, 10-minute video, like it's not like those two things are equal. Um, so we do look at both. Okay? Um, but it—what matters more is just the overall amount of time watched. We're not trying to optimize for time. This is a common misconception is—I was like, "Oh, these platforms, they just want you to spend more time; they're just trying to optimize for time." Time—that is—that is not quite the case for us. I think if you look at, you know, Netflix—from what I can tell—they optimize for time; YouTube—time; TikTok—time, plus some other things around originality and—and—and breaking content. Um, we are a place to be—to—to be entertained—to entertain yourself—to find stuff that—to explore your interests, but we're also a place to connect with your friends. And if we just optimize for time, what would happen is you would—you could just—you would just show longer and longer and more and more videos, but then for every five-minute video you watch, that's maybe 50 things you didn't see from other—other people, including your friends. So we're much more in the like short-video focus. It doesn't mean there's a perfect length for video, but one of the reasons why, you know, the—the primary flows only allow for up to three minutes, it's like we are, you know, a place where we want you to easily explore a bunch of interests, send a couple things to a friend, maybe talk to your friends about them, and short video is way more uh—like close to that friend connection use case than long video because long video becomes much less participatory and much more—I'm just gonna sit back and watch, right?
Which is awesome; it's not a bad thing, but that's not our thing.
Mhm. I don't think you can really have a lean-back experience that's also one where you talk to your friends. You know, you kind of have to pick two of the three. You can either be long form and short form or short form and friends; it's really hard to be long form and friends.
Makes sense. Um, speaking of hashtags, while we're on the topic of algorithm and increasing reach, um, I know there's been a lot of changes with hashtags over the last few years. I believe you can no longer follow hashtags; the recent section of hashtags is no longer a thing. Um, and I know you've said a few times now that—I got a lot of hate for this.
I'm sure. Yeah, I know you do. Um, uh, is that hashtags are no longer a primary way to increase your reach on Instagram?
They don't significantly increase your reach on Instagram.
Gotcha. Contrary to popular belief.
Yeah. Um, it's just not an important thing for—for reach. Um, so I don't know—I—I can say that all I want. People—I mean, I like hashtags; there's nothing—again, hashtags—we moved away from following hashtags because it wasn't really being used that much, and just recommendations in general were kind of handling that. Uh, we moved away from the recent tab, which I know people really like because it just was—a safety and a—spam—it was getting abused by bad actors.
I would imagine.
Yeah. It's just much harder to—to—to—um—to manage the safety risks and the spam risks because you can just—if it's just determin—I know everyone's just like, "Just do—go cry—deterministic recent—hashtag recent feed," but for hashtag specifically, if you just do that, it's really easy just to like post a thousand bad things that don't quite violate our community guidelines but almost do and just take over that page. And so it just became like not worth it. Um, whereas if you allow us to rank, we can then filter out things that are problematic or spammy or repetitive or unoriginal. Um, and we don't have that ability if it's just a chrono thing. Um, and it just was getting abused too much. Um, so I get it; I'm sure a bunch of people are just steaming hearing me say it, um, but that was—I want to be honest. Uh, I'd rather tell people why and have them disagree than just like—yeah, pretend it wasn't an intentional decision.
Is there a day where hashtags are removed from Instagram completely?
I don't think so. Um, I think there's a—probably a couple interesting ways we could evolve it. Um, we'll see where search goes over the next year or two, but there's no plan to just remove them.
Gotcha. Staying on the topic of hashtags, there are some banned hashtags—hashtags you can't use. What happens if you use one unknowingly on one of your posts? Will that affect the post? Will that affect your account? Will that be a content violation?
It's not a content violation, and basically what will happen is it just won't turn into a link. Gotcha. And so we basic—so, you know, we try to make sure we're not encouraging people to discover unsafe content, right? So, you know, anything related to self-harm, for instance, or—that's the kind of thing that we would just basically block the tag. Um, it's not a strike. Uh, I don't know if it would affect your distribution or not. I should double check before I answer because we're being recorded. Um, I don't think it would, but I would—I'd like—
To double check that, um, but mostly the main thing is like we just don't want to make that a link you didn't know; maybe you didn't mean it. Sometimes they actually seem like benign names because a lot of people try to work around these systems by using codes for these different things, um, and so you might bump into one of these terms by mistake. Gotcha.
Um, speaking of, you know, banned things, and obviously there are certain like self-harm related or curse words that might be, um, frowned upon—let's call it—are there specific words or phrases that the algorithm can detect in our content, um, and then downrank us or our content because of it?
It's not quite that direct. Okay, so there's not like a list of words that you're not allowed to use, and then you're going to get down-ranked, um, but we do have things like, um, you know, we have—you mean there's two—there's two sets of rules at a high level. There's what we call Our Community Standards, which is like what can and cannot be on the site; you know, you're not allowed to post, you're not allowed to like celebrate violence, you're not allowed to, you know, post nudity, you're not allowed to, you know, post a series of things. But then there's also our recommendation guidelines, which is content that we feel comfortable or not comfortable recommending. And the reason we have those is, even though it's complicated, is because if you're seeing something from someone you follow, then if you find it offensive, that's on the person you follow, right? If you just post something offensive and I follow you, it's like that's on you.
Yeah, and it was—and it was your decision to follow me. Exactly. So we don't—we try not to get between people and people they follow. Um, there are, I think, at this point, zero safety, um, like zero of these like recommendation implementations for connected content. We do not downrank content from people you follow because we think it might be offensive. Okay, ever. Um, but if we just show you a post for some rando you've never heard of and it's really offensive, yeah, that's not really on that random person; it's more on us. Okay. Uh, so we have more responsibility there, so we take more uh precautions there. And so it's possible if you write really aggressive content, there might be nothing wrong with that; maybe you are advocating for a cause and you're mad, and you have a right to be—that's okay—um, but it might get caught up in, oh, this isn't harassment, but it's borderline; it's aggressive, and we won't recommend it. So it's possible that—sounds like this is specific words—but if you are posting something and it's getting close to—MH—one of our rules, um, it's—it—it will be less likely to be recommended. Nudity is another example; if you post something that is like—like borderline nudity but not actual nudity, so we will not take it down because you are—you know—exactly where that line is and you're not crossing it; you're going right up to that line, um, the chances are you're not going to have that content recommended because we're going to see that as probably not appropriate for to recommend to people who haven't decided to follow you, but we will not get between you and your followers.
Gotcha. Okay, I do feel like the account status area in settings is very helpful, um, being able to check and see, is my content recommendable? Am I in good standing? Um, I'm curious though, are there ever times where people are not recommendable or not able to have this disconnected reach and yet it doesn't show up in the account status? So basically this is what people would say: does Instagram shadow ban?
Yeah. If there are—there are very few. Okay. Um, there are—there are a couple real edge cases, for the most gnarly potential harm you can think of, okay, where we might want to be careful not to let someone know that we are like looking into something, um, but those are the minority cases. So our hope is to put all of it in there, um, everything at the account level, right? It's possible that one piece of content might get caught up, but your account is fine, so that won't be in there, um, but at the account level, we try to have everything be in there. The only exceptions I can think of are for the darkest of dark, which I hope nobody watching here feels like they could possibly fall into that category.
Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. And I—what I also often tell people is, a ban is a ban; all social media has their guidelines, and they have the right to downrank your content or not recommend your content, but it's not a shadow ban, especially in Instagram's case, when they're telling you—yeah—the word shadow is not involved because it's in the light; you're telling them—yeah. And that's the thing that I try to explain, and I'm not always that good at it, but um, I want people to know it's in our interest for people to know if you know what the rules are and if you know what the content is that we're trying to reward, then you're going to probably make more content like that, and that's good for you and for us. It's not in our interest to like, in the shadows, like make decisions and—and you know—now look, sometimes we make mistakes, um, most of those mistakes I hope are reflected in account status, so you can go there, you can see if content is taken down, you can appeal, you can see if you've got any recommendation issues, you can appeal or remove those pieces of content, uh, but I want people to know because I think it's in our interest for people to know. Um, sometimes things are broken, um, but usually—usually not—usually. It's a—been us going on.
Gotcha. Uh, recently in one of your Ask Me Anything Fridays, you answered a question I thought made a lot of sense around uh taking a break, and essentially, if you take a long break and say eight months without any posts on Instagram and then you come back, the algorithm doesn't have much data that it's been recently trained on, and so it's very likely that that new post won't perform all that great.
Yeah, that's true. I don't like that that's the case, so I'd love us to figure out a way to do it. I just want us to be honest about the fact that that's the case. Do you have any idea? Is it like a sliding scale and that the longer time you spend off, the less recent data there is, or is that—once it hits three weeks, then it's no longer considered recent data?
It's—it's between the two. So basically, I think if you—I don't think there's a big difference if you take off three months or four months. Okay. I think once you get to about a month—part—I should—I'll double check on exactly how long we retain some of these signals for. It's not that we have no signals, right? Like if I follow you and you post again, we've got some signals on my interest in you, but we've got more signals on my interest in other people because you've been off for a month or two, um, but it kind of—I think you probably realized most of that unfortunate loss in that first month or two, um, but it's definitely not by design.
Gotcha. It's a—it's a byproduct of how we build things, and that doesn't mean I'm happy about it, um, it's something I'd like us to figure out how to address. I think there's probably other things that are more important to address, um, like getting better at recency and originality and some of these other concepts, um, but it is—I've experienced it; like I've gone off for a month, you know, I don't know, I went to recharge, I had a kid, and I came back and I was like, oh yeah, I gotta work my way back.
Yeah, yeah. Um, in terms of consumption and like the interaction component, if I'm a creator and I create about this one niche topic—rock climbing—but I only consume content or primarily consume content relating to a completely different topic—like cake baking—do those two things affect each other at all? Do they interact with each other?
Or not necessarily? Not necessarily. Okay, that'd be kind of cool actually. Um, we don't really use—I'm trying to think—even in inferred—I can certainly know—not explicitly, but maybe not even inferred—we don't use your consumption patterns as a signal of how interesting your content is for the people who are interested in your content.
Makes sense. Um, we do look at things, uh, like, you know, are there groups of people who have interest and interact a lot, etc. So there—there might be some way it seeps in, but if you—if you only post about rock climbing and you only like watching bacon videos, that's great; like we got—there's—there's nothing wrong with that.
What about activity specifically around the time of posting? So I have a post; I'm going to make it 10:00 a.m., and so from 9:45 till 10:00 a.m., I'm active, and I'm responding to stories, and I'm engaging, and then I make the post, and I'm staying active. Does the algorithm reward me for that activity?
Not directly; indirectly it could happen, right? Cuz if you're on there a bunch and you're messaging people and replying to comments or whatever, they might see that, and they might then tap on your profile and then interact with that content, uh, and so indirectly it could help, but the way the ranking system works is it doesn't know that that's why that's happening.
Got it. It's just like, oh, if this thing is getting more engagement, it's more engaging; it's going to do better. And if you're active in a way that is getting people to engage more with your content, then yes, that would help, but it's not—try—something that we're trying to reward. I don't want people to feel like they gotta get on there.
Yeah, I schedule posts all the time. Same. Um, I schedule mine for early because I—we're here on the West Coast, so a lot of my followers in the US, and I want to get my posts out before California's awake and before like New York is really into their day.
Yeah, and I'm not up at 5:00 a.m.—well, actually, I'm often up at 5:00 a.m. because I got little kids—but I'm not on—I'm not on my—I'm not on Instagram at 5:00 a.m. when I scheduled these posts.
Yeah, I used to be the same way, living in California, wanting to post so the East Coasters could enjoy it, and yeah, this was before I scheduled, and I'd wake up and make the post, and oh my God, a stressful way to wake up before we scheduled posts. I set alarms like 4:30; I get up; my wife's like, what? I'm like, I gotta post this—gotta post a reel.
Um, I want to shift gears into some new features, some things that are upcoming, maybe plans for 2025. Uh, first, I want to talk about Live. Is there any new exciting features, anything that you can share about changes coming to Live in 2025?
No, I wish I had something for you on that. I feel really disappointed in myself when you ask that question.
I'm—I'm sorry for asking.
No, it's okay. I just—you know, with the rise of popularity of Live on other platforms, live shopping, I was wondering if Instagram was working on anything like that.
Nothing major that I can think of. Okay. Um, another new feature I've—you've mentioned this a few times—Blends. I'm psyched about Blends.
I knew you were gonna be psyched about this question, so tell me more about Blends and kind of how it's going to operate, supposedly.
So the way it works is you can start a blend with a friend in uh a thread. So if you and I message, uh, there'll be a little blend icon at the top, and we can start a blend, and it's just a feed of Reels that you or I or both of us might be interested in. Okay, and as you—as you scroll through it, it'll show you who it's for. Oh, so you can be like, ah, you know—you know—this one—this one was like for Adam. You have to opt into it, so because it's—it's—it's personal, right? You see my very intimate—
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You get a—you get a look into the wild—weird—weird world of your friends' interests. Yeah. Um, and then you can—you know—and the—the default action if you—if you sort of reply is to send the message, so you're talking about it, um, and so it's pretty fun actually. Uh, I don't know if it's for everyone, uh, um, you can also do it in group chats too, not just one-on-one chats, um, but look, I want us to be a place where you connect, you know, over your interests. We're not the best place to sit and just watch TV or video, and if I'm running late, I'm not going to DM you on Instagram; I'm probably going to WhatsApp you or hit you up on iMessage or something, uh, but I think we can be the best place to connect with the people you care about about the things you care about. To me, this sits right at the heart of that in a really kind of cool way.
Yeah, it—um, you know, I know that the—the adoption of people using the friends feed and the—the following feed might not have been as wild, at least from what I hear; people still are unaware that that even exists.
Yeah. Um, so is the hope that because this is in DMs, a place where people are spending more of their time already, that it will be a more heavily adopted feature?
At the hope, at least to some degree. Yeah, but it's really not about—I'll be pretty excited about it if it's not something that drives a lot of incremental engagement for the whole platform, but if it's a—if it's like a really meaningful thing for a minority of people who just really love it.
Gotcha. Because I feel like not everything is about growing the pie; growing the pie is good, you know, if there's more people spending more time on Instagram, you know, that—that is helpful for us as a business; that is helpful for creators because there's more reach to go around, um, but if you only grow by just doing things that you can get anywhere else—you get the same movie clips and like old sports highlights and all this commoditized content that you can get anywhere else—then it's—yeah, you might grow engagement, but you are—you're less—it's easier to leave Instagram in the future, whereas if there's content that you can only find on Instagram or experiences you can only have on Instagram, that might not make us more money; that might not mean that any average creator reach goes up, but it might just like deepen someone's appreciation for the experience. I think that's pretty rad. So—um—this one, I'm actually—there's multiple ways this could work out that I'd be pretty happy with.
Good. Um, speaking of growing the pie and increasing average reach, um, I was reading a study that—um—at least according to this one study, average reach for Reels, carousels, feed images, and stories were all significantly down last year compared to the year prior. Is—I'm curious, why is that? Why? And I know this is the number one question I receive—number one question—I'm sure you receive is, why am I not getting the views I feel I deserve?
Yeah, I mean, I wish I had a great answer that would satisfy people who aren't getting as much reach as they feel like they deserve. In general, reach is going up for some people and down for other people; it's much more of a blend. The thing that's hard is that though overall there's more reach to go around this year than last year, um, there's also more people on Instagram, and so there's more competition, and so like if—if there're—in the—if there are 10%—if there's 10% more content because either, you know, because there's 10% more people and they're all posting the same amount a day as a year ago, that doesn't mean there's 10% more things consumed; yeah, there's probably one or two percent more things consumed. Okay, so that means that there's more—there can be more competition. In practice, there are people growing, and there are people shrinking, and there's people who are roughly flat. There's also people who turn out—right—you don't get the reach you deserve for long enough; you move on. Yeah. Uh, and there's new people all the time who either have signed up for a while but now just starting to post or they just sign up in the first place, so there's also a decent amount of sort of churn, uh, for lack of a better word.
Um, so I want to get someone's content to every single person who's really interested in it, because if we can do that, the person who sees a video or photo will be happy, the creator of the video will be happy, and then we'll be happy because both of those people will be happy and they'll be using Instagram more. Um, are we perfect at ranking? Absolutely not, um, but we're getting better all the time, um, so I—it is the thing I try to really explain to people is it is in our interest to get someone's content to every person who's really interested—interested in it, and if we're failing to do so, that's bad for our business.
Yeah, people think that we suppress reach to get people to buy ads; it doesn't make any sense. It's easy to get people—other people to buy—that wouldn't be a sustainable business model.
No, no, it would just be—no one would be there, and it just wouldn't work. Like we have over 10 million advertisers around the world on—on Meta advertising, and like we have—we've got—that's okay—that's—that's a different challenge. There's weaknesses and strengths there, but we are more than happy to grow engagement with one group of people and then sell ads to a different group of people against that same attention.
Makes sense. Essentially boils down to supply and demand, so there's an oftentimes an increase in the supply of—maybe the number of people posting, the frequency of their posting—but the demand hasn't necessarily risen at the same pace. Is that what you would say?
Yeah, for a bunch of reasons, right? So for a while, the amount of time people were spending on smartphones was growing every year; that's roughly flat in a lot of countries like the US now. I—it's not like—for a while, a lot of people—I mean, think about how many people you know—well, maybe this is a little bit longer than five years ago, but 10 years ago—but you know, 10 years ago, not everybody had a smartphone; now everybody has a smartphone. You know, we're buying them less often, or you know, five years ago, maybe not everyone had fast internet access, and now most everyone has fast internet access. And so the amount that's on the demand side, right, because the amount of people who are interested in watching stuff isn't growing as—as fast as the amount of people who are interested in reaching people.
Makes sense. Um, and look, I would love it if it was—yeah, that would be great. Um, so the thing that I'm more focused on is how can I make sure that the right value is accrued to the right people? Like, so I still think we're getting better, but I still think aggregators—as great as they are, and they—I'm not anti-aggregator—they get a disproportionate amount of value relative to what they create if you compare them to original content creators.
Yeah. That doesn't mean they—they aren't valuable, right? If you go around and you source awesome stuff and you're able to reach a lot of people about that, that's cool, but ideally, the person who came up with the thing and made the thing gets more views than the person who found your thing. Why? And so we're trying to do more and more to find the original content creator when we can and swap that person into that spot, um, so but there's still room to improve there.
Last few questions. If TikTok goes away, what's your advice for TikTok creators migrating to Instagram?
I mean, if TikTok goes away, that'd be a big deal. I—I would say, look, more and more creators are across multiple platforms; I think that's just smart. I try to lean into that; like I—I feel like it's good to not have all your eggs in one basket. It's my job to make sure Instagram is as compelling a platform as possible, but it's a great basket.
Yeah, exactly. Or a great egg, but you can have a couple other eggs; that's cool. Um, when you're joining Instagram, I think that—I mean, there's some things that are the same, and there's some things that are different for any platform—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook—the most important thing is to be really clear-eyed about what you're trying to accomplish, um, and then make sure that the work you do aligns with that. Sure, reach is great, but for what end? Are you trying to get brand deals? Are you trying to evangelize a cause? Are you trying to sell mugs? Like, what are you doing? And then—okay, you've got that goal in mind—you then need to find the overlap between content that is going to help you achieve that goal and content that is going to be compelling because if it achieves that goal and it's not compelling, no one's going to see it, and if it's compelling and it doesn't achieve that goal, why are you doing it? And then the third is that it's true to you. So that's true of all the platforms. For Instagram specifically, if you're new to Instagram or you haven't been using it as much—much—I think it's important to understand that it's not just about um short-form video; that's a huge part of what we do; it's a lot of the time—it's maybe probably more than half the time spent on the platform at this point, um, but there's a lot of other things too that can kind of be really interesting. Um, you can do stories that show behind the scenes of how you make your Reels; you can create a channel and really create a deep relationship with your most passionate followers and message them directly. You know, there's—and the coolest stuff happens when people connect the dots between these things; you know, they tease their video that's going to come out on Sunday in their stories on Friday, or I met a creator once that unfollowed everybody and then refolled a bunch of people every month with a different focus, so you know, one—one month it was about climate change, one month it was about, you know, women's education, and I was like, okay, that's really cool; you should make a video on the first of the month explaining why and then point them to that. These are the kind of things where it gets really fun, so I would—I would—don't feel like you have to do everything, but it'd be good to understand all the pieces so you can see if there's anything that aligns with your interests. I often say that the diversity of ways you can approach Instagram is really its biggest strength in that you have stories and Reels and photos and carousels and all these different ways you can create and engage with the platform.
Yeah, and—and you gotta figure out the ones that are good for you because doing all of them might be too much.
Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Um, last question. Besides Blends, what feature is coming in the pipeline that you're most excited about or that can make the biggest difference, maybe for creators or—I don't know if I can say—I don't—any—I'm already like sharing with—I'm probably gonna get a little grief for how much I—I—it rhymes with—Creator specifically—rhymes with uh—for creators specifically—I don't know. Um, I feel like—a new thing—I can—I can—I can tease, but I will say this: I am very excited about the long-term potential around partner ads. Partner ads allow you to create content as a creator, and then have—you know, you can do this deal offline; that's fine—with a brand, and then they can ask for um the permission to use your creative for their own ads and run ads to our ad system, um, and you have to approve that as a creator, and you can make that deal however you want to make that deal. The reason I really like it—might be a little bit academic, but I think it matters—is that in general branded content, there's no measurement, right? So you don't know—as an advertiser—I—I paid—I paid you five grand to post this thing—that I get anything from it. Our ad system has a lot of measurement, which means that how much you are actually helping the advertiser is—
Going to be much better. Quantified MH, and that is, I think, going to be really good for the small creators. Because when an advertiser doesn't have measurement, they don't really know; they go on their gut; they go with the big name that they know or they like. Yeah, um, and so I think—and sorry if you're a big creator out there—I think the biggest creators are probably overpaid, and the smallest, and the small—even not just the smallest—and the and everybody else, particularly the small creators, are underpaid. Absolutely. And so, and this is growing a lot on, um, on Instagram, the partner hat system. And so if we can grow that more, I think we can help shift more dollars from the biggest creators to the little ones. I think that's pretty cool, because the whole promise of Instagram and really the internet is to help you discover your niche interests, allow anyone to be successful.
Uh, and then there's other things we can build on top of that around the Creator Marketplace and helping brands find the creators that can help them and help creators vet the right brands and make sure they're reputable. So there's a lot more work to do there. Uh, some people know about it; it's grown really fast, but we don't—you don't hear about it a lot. So I think that would be the one that I would be the most excited about.
Awesome, Adam. Thank you so much.
Thanks for having me. This was a blast.
Yeah, I appreciate you. Cheers again. I want to say thank you so much for listening today. I would not be here, and I would not have been able to make this interview happen if it wasn't for supporters like you. I want to ask you to subscribe to this podcast, where we release episodes every single week about the latest trends, tips, and strategies across the various social medias. And I do want to let you know that next week I'm going to be posting a follow-up to today's interview, where I'm going to break down my thoughts and my responses to his answers to the questions. But if this is the last video of mine that you ever watch and the last time you ever hear my voice, I want to say one last time, thank you so much for being here, and as always, happy networking.