Instagram’s tumultuous relationship with creators is becoming more heated with the Facebook-owned platform’s latest proclamation that it is “no longer a photo-sharing app” and will lean further into video content.
For creators who have long focused their efforts on photography, the news is maddening. Others who have begun to produce more video and Reels on the platform welcome the change, but feel if the algorithm doesn’t evolve, their efforts are still better spent across multiple platforms. Experts at influencer agencies say brand deals will keep creators on Instagram, but they expect the changes to spur more multiplatform creators.
The situation could have major implications on brand influencer deals as marketers place bets on which apps resonate the best with creators and their followers.
At the end of June, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, posted a video to Instagram and Twitter in which he laid out changes coming to the platform, namely that the app will embrace full-screen, mobile video more broadly and bring more recommendations to users’ feeds. The effort is a way to dive deeper into a format hooking younger audiences and therefore brand budgets. It's also a way to lure creators who have also been shifting efforts to TikTok where video creation is faster and the algorithm allows for more visibility.
“Let’s be honest. There’s some really serious competition right now. TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger, and there’s lots of other upstarts as well,” says Mosseri in the video. “And so people are looking to Instagram to be entertained, there’s stiff competition and there’s more to do, then we have to embrace that. And that means change.”