First, YouTube came to shortform with YouTube Shorts, and now Instagram is hitting back by going longform.
On Monday, the social media platform announced Features, an offering that will allow creators to upload horizontal videos that are up to 90 minutes long. It’s a move that has the potential to disrupt the current creator landscape.
Features is clearly designed to be a YouTube competitor that keeps users on Instagram at a time when competition between platforms is brutal. Creators like NowThis use shortform platforms like Instagram Reels, TikTok or YouTube Shorts to drive viewers to the more lucrative YouTube. But with Features, Instagram hopes to cut out the middle man and follow in YouTube’s TV footsteps in the process.
For the past three years, YouTube has reigned as the No. 1 most-watched streamer or channel on all of television, accounting for 15.8% of all TV usage in the U.S. during the month of August, according to Nielsen. That was more than twice Netflix’s viewership and amounted to more than all of The Walt Disney Company’s TV properties combined.
Instagram believes it can take a cut of this business too.
“It’s very much about TV,” Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said on Monday during an interview with Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, the creators behind “Colin and Samir.” “You look at YouTube in the U.S. As best we can tell, their time spent on devices is flat, and all their growth is coming on TV. It’s not about the time spent as much as the cultural relevance. We want to be the most culturally relevant platform, and to do that, we just need to show up where people are.”
But these television ambitions are going to face some serious hurdles. For one, YouTube has long been established as the creator-focused social media leader when it comes to TV viewership. As any streamer that’s tried to compete with Netflix knows, it’s hard to contend with that sort of first-to-market dominance, especially during a time when successful shortform creators like “Obsession” director Curry Barker are still casually being called YouTubers. Also, creator revenue on YouTube remains more diversified compared to Instagram, which relies solely on brand sponsorships vs. YouTube’s Creator Fund as a secondary stream.
Still, the shakeup has some in the industry buzzing over the new opportunities it creates.
“I’m very excited about it, and I think we’ll all be curious to see relative performance,” Sharon Mussalli, CEO of the creator-focused media company NowThis, told TheWrap. As part of its current strategy, most of NowThis’ series designed for Gen Z women premiere on shortform platforms like Instagram and TikTok with longer episodes living on YouTube. “I can imagine a world where people will be placing the same thing on Instagram as they are on YouTube, and see how the two behave differently from each other.”
The Hot New Platform for Creators Is IRL
Though the option for additional distribution may be alluring, especially for creators who have a majority of their followers on Instagram, others are more skeptical about the impact this may have on the creator ecosystem.
“[Instagram] still has not made it clear like, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a business structure attached to this’ where I can now start to think about Instagram as being my core platform for longform,” Aaron DeBevoise, CEO and founder of Spotter, told TheWrap. “It really needs that economic structure for creators to be able to say, ‘I could invest in myself and do more content.’”
Those concerns aside, there is hope that Instagram’s TV ambitions may work. This investment is coming at a time when it’s more difficult than ever to be a qualified YouTube creator thanks to changes on that platform. Instagram is also the only other video-focused social media platform to prioritize TVs after YouTube. During a time when there is so much competition in the film and TV industries around creators, being on the No. 2 social media TV platform could still end up meaning a lot.
Why Instagram believes Features is the future
Parent Meta already made its ambitions for television known in December, when it launched Instagram for TV. Since then, there’s been little data on its performance, even if Meta is optimistic.
A representative for the company declined to share exact numbers but noted that what the team has seen so far is encouraging, which is why Instagram is continuing to invest in optimizing TV viewership. The offering was released last year for Samsung, Fire TV and Google TV in the U.S. and will launch on Apple TV this month.
However, Instagram is under no belief that longtime YouTubers will suddenly move over to its platform. Mosseri and his team believe that there’s an opportunity for shortform creators who are already starting to become famous on Instagram, like the series “Brooklyn Coffee Shop,” to stay on the platform rather than jump ship if they have aspirations to create longer content.
“That is a much more practical audience to serve than trying to get YouTubers who’ve been on YouTube for a decade-plus to move to another platform,” Mosseri said.
It’s a smart move to focus on those emerging creators now. Starting in February of next year, YouTube will double the requirements for new creators to join the YouTube Partner Program, requiring either 8,000 watch hours in the last 365 days or 20 million Shorts views in the last 90 days. Once that change is made, newer creators may not be as loyal to YouTube as older ones who are grandfathered in. Instagram Features also gives creators who have a big audience the convenience of experimenting with longform on the same platform rather than building out a new channel on a different one.
“It could be a whole piloting program,” DeBevoise said. “And that could be like, ‘You’ve made a longform episode and Netflix noticed it.’”
Instagram’s focus on timeliness compared to YouTube’s may also be a draw for some creators. Mussalli drew out the social media lines best: Typically, audiences go to TikTok for brand new content, Instagram for content they know they will like and YouTube for a TV-like experience. While YouTube prioritizes new content from its creators, its recommendations don’t feel as aggressively timely as what audiences may find on TikTok or Reels.
“At NowThis, a lot of our stuff — like, ‘Are You Okay’ or ‘Judgy’ — is in the moment. It’s a celebrity who’s popping off today, or the ‘Love Island’ person who’s going to be on the reunion tonight,” Mussalli said. “If that is the case, then I would think my longform would do very well on Instagram because it is so on-beat and in the moment.”
Even though Instagram is rolling out a longform product — something Mosseri said in 2024 the company would never do — it’s still approaching the offering in a different way than competitors like YouTube or even Netflix. Mosseri estimated that Instagram focuses on watch time “way less” than the rest of Instagram’s competition, but that the company also focuses on sends, comments, likes and story shares. Sends are especially important to the company.
“There was a period where bringing more video into Instagram, bringing more video into Facebook drove up watch time, but it was bad for everything else,” Mosseri said. “Then, when Reels became very accretive to Instagram was when we started to make them more social, particularly like you see a video and then you send it to a friend and then you connect over that video and then they maybe watch something else. It became symbiotic.”
Factors working against Instagram Features
Even if Instagram on TV is a massive success and the parameters change, the YouTube Partner Program will still be a major draw for some creators, especially those who don’t want to be beholden to brand partnerships. Instagram has no intentions of making its creator payout program more robust. Previous experiments have found that paid Instagram creators don’t create much more content than unpaid ones. For the ones that do increase their output, the quality isn’t as high.
“We spend more money than we make back by a long shot, and so it doesn’t really make sense to scale up because we’re just burning capital,” Mosseri said.
That being said, Instagram is open to potentially setting up an ad revenue share for creators, much like what YouTube utilizes.
“There’s no AdSense RevShare program associated with [Features], so it’s kind of that classic question for creators and artists right now that they have to make on every platform: Do the additional views and potential new fans outweigh keeping things exclusive to a platform like YouTube or even syndicating to places like Spotify that have ad share programs?” Eric Bogard, CEO and co-founder of UnderCurrent Talent, told TheWrap.
But even if Instagram follows YouTube exactly, it’s still going to be late to this particular party. YouTube has been available to watch on TVs since 2009 when a version of the platform came to the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii. Instagram has been in the living room for less than a year.
Also, YouTube still skews younger than Instagram. A Pew Research poll found that 95% of Americans aged 18 to 29 years old use YouTube compared to the 79% of the same age group who said they used Instagram.
Instagram isn’t the only company that’s mixing up the creator landscape. After a wave of layoffs and the firings of both Bela Bajaria and Dan Lin, Netflix — the biggest streamer to heavily invest in creator content — is looking to scale back its creator and podcasting aspirations. Both of the verticals were championed by Bajaria in the hopes they would draw in younger viewers. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos was reportedly never a fan of the pivot, according to Bloomberg, and is repositioning the streamer to focus on premium film and TV.
“I do think Netflix will continue to go down this path, whether they find that creator on Instagram or they find that creator on YouTube,” DeBevoise said, noting that the lower-cost content that creators provide is very alluring to streamers that often spend millions on shows. “The big difference is creators have built trust with these audiences in a way that the creator of ‘Stranger Things’ never could.”
Regardless of how Instagram may fit into this constantly evolving TV landscape, the platform is dedicated to making it work.
“It’s our incentive to figure it out. If we don’t figure out a way for creators to get a sufficient amount of value — whether it’s dollars or something else — out of posting Features, they won’t post Features,” Mosseri said. “We’re going to have to figure this out, otherwise it will fail. So we are trying to be open-minded and humble as we embark on this new path.”
