Gone in an Insta
INSTAGRAM is doing away with “likes.” And, boy, do people hate it. Instagram’s new pilot scheme, which launched last month in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Italy, Japan and Brazil, ensures that users can see the likes they get on a post — but other users can’t. The test has been active since May in Canada and could soon be trialed in the UKand the US. And it’s provoking some full-scale meltdowns.
Mikaela Testa, a 19year-old Instagram influencer from Australia, released a teary video that almost instantly went viral protesting the policy. She wrote, “Regardless of what you may think, Instagram is a REAL job and those in the industry have worked hard to get where they’re at . . . I’ve put my blood sweat and tears into this for it to be ripped away.”
This seems like a dramatic reaction to a change on a social-media platform, but she’s not wrong. Instagram influencers, who are generally beautiful women, aren’t much different from models of old — they’ve just cut out the modeling agencies that profit off their image. At the moment, brands are shelling out big money for them to post pictures of their products — CPC Strategy marketing estimates that influencers can charge about $1,000 per 100,000 followers for a post about a brand. Kylie Jenner reportedly gets paid $1 million per Instagram post on a brand. At 21, she recently became the world’s youngest billionaire.
Likes matter. According to Forbes, MRI pictures of people’s brains have shown that how many likes a post gets alters its appeal to viewers. And because it’s so easy for posters to boost their number of followers by buying them, likes are a much more genuine measure of an influencer’s reach.
Obviously, Instagram influencers are worried that eliminating likes will make their posts seem less appealing and cut into their profits.
You know who else is worried about profits? Instagram executives.
Yet Instagram chief Adam Mosseri claimed in a chipper statement about the change, “We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re get
ting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about.”
That sounds nice. But we all know it’s BS. It’s hard to pretend that a platform through which people were sharing child pornography (as The Atlantic reported this January) is really worried about the public’s mental well being. If people actually wanted to connect with others they care about, as Mosseri suggests, they should log off social media altogether.
According to a recent report on the Daily Mail Web site, Instagram can’t make serious money selling ads to companies on the platform, so it’s now trying to beat the influencers at their own game.
“Instagram is a ‘likes-first’ platform, and naturally ads don’t get a lot of likes, which has the effect of making often reputable products appear fake or unpopular,” one insider told the outlet. “Instagram took so long to implement a viable algorithm that all these ‘influencers’ took it into their own hands.”
And if Instagram’s “like ban” becomes permanent, brands won’t be so anxious to work with influencers whose metrics of success will be a lot less obvious. Many of them will have their livelihoods stripped away.
It’s part of a general trend on the web. Where once enterprising young pioneers found a way to make a living through YouTube or Facebook or other platforms, social-media companies are increasingly chipping away at those profit-making efforts by changing their algorithms, exerting increasingly more influence on who makes money and who doesn’t.
You might think we should just tell Instagram influencers to “get a real job” — but they have become a viable force in the modern-day economy. By becoming their own photographers, stylists, hairdressers and makeup artists, they have found an honest way to utilize a fairly silly device to make some real dough.
The hustle of Instagram stars is admirable. The greed of Instagram, estimated to be worth $100 billion, isn’t.
And upsetting their most valuable contributors is playing with fire.
We’ve learned that social-media platforms don’t necessarily stay popular forever (so long, MySpace). And if big-money posters like Jenner migrate to a friendlier platform, their fans will follow. These people are, after all, influencers.