Anne, a young 30-year-old and a heavy Instagram user for 7 years, recently deleted her account without regret: “I was fed up with the content with too much advertising, too many people showing up and videos not representative of the real life. I now take news directly from my friends. Impossible to quantify if a fundamental movement and abandonment of “Insta” has started, but it is enough to take a look at the comments of the iOS and Android application stores to get an idea of the frustration of users, put update after update.
The most recent reviews simply call for a return to the old version of the platform. “We can’t even see the photos of our friends anymore, something for which we downloaded Instagram at the base”, complains, for example, Ayaam59 on the App Store.
Dedicated to artist photography in its very beginnings, Instagram has evolved step by step towards monetization. “Instagram is a site where you can share and see beautiful creative photos taken from all over the world”, explained to us in 2015 one of its creators Kevin Systrom, who ended up, annoyed by the strategy, by leaving the ship bought by Meta (formerly Facebook) in 2012.
The weight of monetization
“Facebook’s history repeats itself with a free social network that started out as a qualitative and community-based one that becomes a promotional site as it becomes very popular and brands spend a lot of money to be ubiquitous there”, observes Julien Pillot, professor of digital economy and strategy at the INSEEC business school. “Monetization has gradually led to pushing forward more advertising and content from influencers that are disguised advertising,” judges the expert.
Indispensable and profitable for years, the photo platform with a nice filter did not see a new actor arrive in the rear-view mirror who took it by surprise when Snapchat and its ephemeral videos had already shaken its status a little. Boosted by the confinements of 2020, the Chinese bulldozer TikTok and its videos in vertical format crushed everything in its path and recovered a generation of adolescents despite a criticized start.
“The Americans have for once been overtaken by the Chinese and have had to adapt to keep advertisers in the face of this new competition”, underlines Thomas Fauré, boss of the French corporate social network Whaller. “Meta has been overtaken by its own business model where attention and data aggregation are essential to sell advertising. They therefore had to urgently modify the recommendation algorithms to push short-format videos that appeal to people,” he analyzes.
“Algorithmic highlighting gives pride of place to dynamic content that attracts more attention and generates more engagement, the sinews of war for social networks that sell attention to their customers”, completes the teacher-researcher Julien Pillot. The platform with 1.4 billion daily users thus intends to seduce and retain the youngest accustomed to the TikTok format. Even if they have to juggle between the two applications.
“Reels continue to be an important and growing part of Instagram,” a Meta spokesperson acknowledged. “We have over the past year announced that we will focus on simplifying the creation of videos and investing more in Reels”, explains the parent company.
The phenomenon should indeed increase because Instagram announced this Thursday that videos of less than 15 minutes, the vast majority of content, will in the future be shared in the Reels format, videos of 15 seconds, launched in August 2020. to counter the rise of TikTok… with limited effect so far.