HOW IT’S TRYING TO DETHRONE YOUTUBE AND SAVE FACEBOOK
The beloved photosharing app stumbled earlier this year in launching IGTV, its Youtubelike product. Now, Instagram’s founders are gone, and its parent company (Facebook) is getting antsy: Somebody’s got to get that play button to work.
The 30-year-old product manager in charge of IGTV, Instagram’s long-form video platform, is standing in front of a small crowd of twentysomething digital editors and content creators on a warm September morning at Rosaliné, a bistro in West Hollywood. Tucked among trendy boutiques and overpriced salons, the space features ivory tiles, mid-century modern furniture, and cascading green flora, giving it a distinctly “Instagrammy” feel—to borrow a term used by Instagram employees to describe the composed, art-directed aesthetic that defines the image-sharing app. Most hands shoot up, and Yuki, who has the enthusiastic energy of a camp counselor, looks relieved. “Okay! That’s good! Lots of hands. Keep your hand up if you’ve actually used IGTV.” Sensing the crowd’s trepidation, she soothingly urges, “It’s okay. Be honest.” Several arms descend, but Yuki keeps smiling as she assures the crowd that today “will hopefully inspire you to try it.” IGTV is Instagram’s five-month-old bid to become more than just an app that you scroll through during life’s in-between moments to see photo and video snippets of your friends. It aspires to be a “lean back” experience that users tune in to for long stretches of time. Like Youtube, the platform that it’s most trying to ape, IGTV allows creators to upload video—up to 60 minutes for certain influencers—onto a “channel.” But unlike Youtube, IGTV requires all of its content to be shot and viewed in a vertical format, to complement the way people actually hold their phones. This behavioral change is a risk that Instagram is very aware it’s taking: “In the whole history of humankind, we haven’t shot video this way or looked at video this way,” Yuki tells the crowd. (This is true but for Snapchat’s efforts to create this habit, which has been successful in limited doses but not for Tv-length programming.) As a next step in Instagram’s evolution, IGTV makes strategic sense. Instagram’s 1 billion users already watch 60% more video on the platform than they did a year ago, and it has amassed a creative class of influencers that it would like to retain as exclusively as it can. Although Instagram doesn’t directly make money from influencers, they drive up the platform’s audience and engagement. Also, as advertising dollars continue to migrate from traditional TV, a new video advertising product could lure marketers who already love Instagram and are increasingly wary of Youtube. But for IGTV to power Instagram—and Facebook—into the future, it needs to continue Instagram’s heretofore unblemished record of rolling out unequivocally adored (and adopted) products: video, direct messages, time-lapse videos, Gif-like videos, non-square photos, and Stories. Just two months after Instagram launched Stories in 2016, for example, the company hit 100 million users. (Snapchat, which originated the Stories format, reached 100 million users overall about 18 months after launching it.) Instagram hasn’t released any IGTV viewership numbers, but individual video views tend to be disappointingly low, in many instances garnering tens of thousands of views while the same clip gets millions on Youtube. Executives at the company insist on referring to IGTV as a “work in progress.” Creators, brands, and financial analysts have not decreed it a bust, but they are a little flummoxed thus far. “Lots of promise,” says BTIG media analyst Rich Greenfield. “Not lots of execution to date.” The IGTV stumble comes at a particularly inopportune time for Facebook, which acquired Instagram in 2012. In late September, Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger abruptly announced that they were leaving the company, where they had reputedly enjoyed unusual independence. Reports in the wake of their departure noted that their status there had shifted, and that the pair had had to fight to get a green light for IGTV because some Facebook executives were reluctant to divert focus from Facebook’s own struggling video platform, Watch. How Yuki and her boss, Adam Mosseri— who was elevated in October from Instagram’s product chief to running the whole service—address IGTV’S deficiencies will be crucial for the future of both Instagram and Facebook. Instagram’s stature as “the most important visual platform for anyone under 30,” as Gabrielle Rossetti, SVP of strategy and innovation at Havas Media, puts it, has made it invaluable to Facebook, as the world’s largest social network struggles to retain younger users. Meanwhile, Facebook’s advertising growth has slowed (while Instagram’s skyrockets), and the parent company is also facing heightened scrutiny around its security and data-collection practices and their societal implications. Two years ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook would become a “video first” company, and reports in the fall of 2017 suggested that the company could spend up to $1 billion on original content to support this effort. IGTV is arguably Facebook’s best shot to get long-form video right, and in the process take a bigger share of the $170 billion global video advertising market. If Instagram can become a one-stop social and entertainment platform, then Facebook will have a growth engine to help the company through its crises. But first? People need to know IGTV exists.
WE SAT DOWN AND WERE LIKE, ‘All right, what is the next big thing for Instagram?’ ”
Krieger is effusive and chummy in midseptember as he recalls how IGTV came to be. It was October 2017, and he and Systrom made a list. “We were imagining what the future could be. It was fun.” One idea: “The next generation’s Tv-viewing experience.”