The universe of social video is expanding. And contracting.
Two social media giants signaled very different directions last week, as Instagram abandoned its long-video hub IGTV to focus on Reels, its more snackable TikTok-like feature for 15-second clips. Meanwhile, the video competitor went the other way. TikToks that set off today’s short-video craze went the other way, raising its maximum time cap to 10 minutes.
For years, the reigning online marketing advice for brands and marketers urged brands and influencers to keep videos brief and quippy. Suddenly, that’s no longer a given.
According to both companies, the updates were conceived with content creators in mind. TikTok wants to offer more time for creative expression, it said, while Instagram’s move emphasizes simplicity, with all videos living inside its primary app, and monetization through Reels. In other words, the Meta company has tried long videos and short ones, and now it’s essentially throwing its lots in with the “short is better” mind-set. But for how long remains to be seen.
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If observers view Instagram’s video strategy as shambolic, that’s only because they’re paying attention. When the company introduced IGTV in 2018, it was confident then that longer formats were the future of social video. The latest pivot amounts to a course correction that, it hopes, will give the business and its parent company, Meta, some much-needed help.
But experts like Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Although he thinks the strategy will succeed, at least eventually, he explained in his latest note to clients that “our bottom up analysis of Reels user adoption and monetization rates speak to larger near-term headwinds.” As a short-video feature, it directly competes with TikTok, which has a lower monetization rate, and that calls into question how fast the platform will drive Reels advertising.
With Instagram and Meta prioritizing engagement more, the change comes off as “a larger near-term uncertainty,” Nowak said, leading the firm to expect a “lower advertising load at the moment” and a slowdown in revenue growth. On Wednesday, he cut Meta’s price target from $360 to $325. Despite a few pops in trading this week, the company is still trying to claw its way back from historic losses, thanks mostly to privacy-oriented changes to Apple’s iPhone software.
Long term, Meta places its bets on building the metaverse. But even if a massively connected virtual world is the future of the internet, that’s likely years away, perhaps even a decade. Until then, the company must deal with today’s internet, an imperfect, social media-fueled place increasingly driven by smartphones and their cameras.
In other words, the company’s road to the metaverse runs through Instagram and social videos.
Four years ago, at IGTV’s announcement in San Francisco, founder and then-chief executive officer Kevin Systrom proclaimed, “It’s time for video to move forward and evolve.” It sounded convincing then, as several publishers agreed and jumped on board. By 2019, Meredith broke 20 million views across its IGTV shows and planned to launch more. Others across food, fashion, beauty, tech, business, politics and more reportedly saw views in the high five digits.
But the key target was influencers. And yet, IGTV launched without monetization in place for creators. The viewing experience also seemed muddled, with videos populating the main app, as well as the stand-alone app. That might explain why viewership numbers differed from estimated download figures. After a year or two, app-tracking firm reported that the IGTV app only garnered some 6 million to 7 million downloads — a measly showing for a platform with more than a billion users.
The writing was apparently on the wall, as the company has been slowly eliminating the IGTV branding in stages. It ditched the IGTV button in the main app’s home screen in 2020, then erased the name for this format altogether in October 2021, when it blended long videos and feed videos under the label “Instagram Video.”
The platform will still support lengthier uploads, an Instagram representative confirmed to WWD, so whatever it’s called, the format isn’t going away. Keeping it around seems like a curious choice, though, given the company’s stated preference for simplicity. A clean break and a unified direction would offer that. Also, with support for IGTV ads, or in-stream video ads, ending as well, it doesn’t anticipate very many users will be watching.
For any creators who do manage to make money from IGTV ads, at least the company plans to continue paying them for some period of time — which suggests there aren’t that many of them.
In any case, Reels clearly moves to center stage now, and it may be benefitting from the Instagram’s IGTV experience.
The company focuses much more on content creators these days, with Meta pledging $1 billion investment in this community last year. Reels launched worldwide just weeks ago, and Instagram is already promising to develop more ways these creators can make money. They can earn bonuses with Reels, but they don’t benefit from ad placements, which have been available globally to brands since June 2021. This is one area Instagram will be looking at in the near future.
What’s less clear is what will happen if TikTok’s longer, more in-depth videos take off. If it successfully competes with YouTube where IGTV couldn’t, it could put Instagram in a tough spot. Re-pivoting from an earlier pivot hardly sounds sexy. But if that helps its parent company get to the metaverse promised land, it may not be off the table.
With that, Instagram’s decision to keep long videos on life support may make a little more sense. It also means that, when it comes to understanding what kinds of videos work in social media, brands should stay tuned and take nothing for granted.