An honest conversation with the CEO of Instagram

I remember the first time I watched one of your reels there's a chain there's a cool shirt here I was like wait this is the head of Instagram and I'm into it what is the competition for Tik Tok hurt us but it hurt them way more where does Instagram lie on Revenue share creators are tough to keep happy does like watch time matter people ask a lot about the algorithm I didn't anticipate that answer from you what's one of your interests gardening and planting food in my backyard all right cool Tik Tok is is gone

from the US what does that mean for Instagram I mean today on the Colin beer show we're joined by head of Instagram Adam misseri Adam joined Facebook in 2008 as a product designer and eventually became the head of Instagram in 2018 we came up to the Instagram Offices here in San Francisco and started our conversation with Adam about what type of content performs best on Instagram we also talked about the race to remain competitive with Tik Tok and YouTube and asked Adam about his perspective on creater monetization and revenue sharing on Instagram it's a really

fun and eye- opening conversation that covers a ton of ground I think you guys are going to really enjoy it and if you're watching here on YouTube make sure to subscribe here's our conversation with head of Instagram Adam [Music] masseri Adam welcome to the show thanks for having me the first thing we wanted to ask you is you're the head of Instagram um and we were trying to think in our head like what what does that job mean like what does your day-to-day look like it's a very strange gig you know in the same day

I might talk to a policy maker about a very serious safety issue I might talk about the relative allocation of CPUs and gpus in 2026 I might then have to record something explaining a new ranking update or a new feature that we're launching and then have a one-on-one with someone who's really mad at me for some reason and try to figure out why and how I can do better and that might all be before lunch so it's very schizophrenic how do you get to that point where you now have this very varied job but you

started as a product designer with Facebook yeah I'm curious what does it take to number one grow with someone like Mark Zuckerberg for so many years and rise in the ranks essentially to get to this point I think it was mostly just because I was reliable I wasn't very good I just have a lot of range so I'm a decent at a strangely large number of things and I think that has really helped me that helped me in my transition from product design into product management where being more of a generalist I think is more

advantageous and then into being an executive again it's a very generalist type role to the what we were talking about before because of the range so my career really accelerated when I leaned into that and was honest about what I wasn't good at is there an element though of like being able to develop a relationship specifically with Mark Zuckerberg someone that clearly you know well work closely with with you know to lead Instagram I would imagine you must have some ability to like work well right and to pair well yeah I think you need I

mean for any with any boss to work for them as long as you I have worked for Mark you need to have some level of not just relationship but trust um but I do think that with Mark Mark is very consistent um he is always going to hold a really really high bar he's always going to push you really really hard he's always going to have very high expectations um and you can you can kind of when you've worked with anybody for long enough start to anticipate sort of what their feedback is going to be

what they care about and so as long as you make sure you Embrace that in addition to embracing whatever you believe in and how to you want to approach the role you have to find that balance and I think with Mark I we have that balance most of the time I mean we argue a decent amount we argued a lot in the early years I remember um pushing back a lot on a number of random unimportant design specifics in like 2009 um probably not good career advice I look back at my 26y old hot head

self um but over the time like you build up that trust and where did some of that tension come from back then of like what were you fighting for what was he fighting for like what what does he care about and what do you care about about I mean I think those fights were probably a little bit less principled I was probably just being a pain in the ass he was very results focused and I was I cared about things I still care about now but I was I didn't care enough about other things and

I think what he was doing was pushing me hard on the things that I didn't care about enough that I should have cared about do you feel responsible for Mark's new style no but I love it I love when I started seeing him with the chain I was like he might be hanging out with Adam a lot yeah the chain is good oh man the chain is a whole thing there's so many stories the whole thing I remember the first time I watched one of your reels that's kind of how I came across you for

the first time was one of your own reels oh yeah yeah I was like wait this is the head of Instagram I was like wait one of these is not like the other like comparing you against the other like Tech leaders I was like there's a chain there's a cool shirt here what's happening I'm a big soccer fan this is zadan um look I think that for a long time he embraced not using not wasting any energy on deciding what to wear every day so he wor like the same thing every day for a long

time as a lot of tech execs have done over the years and over the last couple years he's started to explore expressing himself and I'm into it I'm totally into it I think clothes are fun uh so I'm I'm very supportive yeah uh and also to get memed like that with the whole beard thing what I mean you guys spent a lot of time on the internet how many memes are positive about a public figure yeah totally it's such a rare thing and I think also just like being a fun part of the conversation is

is so great and you've been that right I've been Meed I've never been Meed in a nice way I've only been MD in the standard way it could happen there's still time all right I've given upen today who knows we'll see um so obviously so much has changed since that era I mean I come from the mypace era I put all my band's music on MySpace unfortunately it's gone forever now yeah like I can't access that music anymore um but we come from that era I from the the Friendster Myspace era into into Facebook into

Instagram um and Instagram today is is a very different place than you know it was obviously when it first started and what the internet was like when we first started being creators the only place to really post video when we first started in 2011 was uh YouTube and Vimeo those were kind of the two primary did you guys do a lot with Vimeo back in the day he uploaded his first videos yeah I was very uh invested in Vimeo I felt like this is a true place for artists and filmm yeah yeah well that's sort

of like the design aesthetic Vibe kind of thing he he brought me over to YouTube but I was he's like I care about the results my my identity was W he was yeah he was interested in the results I was wrapped up in being the artist yeah unfortunately we also came from the era where like you know the social network the movie came out and I think we were just like this is what we have to do we have to build a a thing and try and get it acquired that was like the the modernization

of the American dream was kind of uh perpetuated by by the story of Facebook right and I think that being a young person coming out of college during that time that was the thing it was like where are we going to build an audience and how are we gonna um build something of scale and you were right and I I guess we were right Vimeo versus YouTube we were right on YouTube we made the right move yeah uh but today obviously there's there's uh an unbelievable amount of places to to post video to build audience

um I'm just curious to to dig into the world of Instagram today uh and and how much video has changed oh a lot yeah a lot I mean I think that when people think of Instagram and you've known Instagram or you've been on Instagram for a while you almost always think of a feed of square photos maybe hypers saturated you know just maybe a little bit too airbrushed or you know Landscapes but if actually you look how people use Instagram it's just changed dramatically and I understand that as we evolve Instagram forward it can be

really frustrating because people get used to using an app in one way and if it changes underneath them that can be annoying but if you think about if we had stuck with a feed of square photos and we didn't have stories and we didn't have DMS and we didn't have videos or reels we wouldn't be anywhere near as relevant as we are today I think the biggest risk that any platform like ours faces is that the world as it continues to change faster and faster gets away from you and you just become irrelevant because you

can't keep up and if you push too hard and you change too quickly that can backfire and we've had that happen and if but if you don't take enough risk and you are too attached to the Past then you're just going to slowly become irrelevant and that's a balance and so you are asking about video video is a huge part of what we do now it's more than half the amount of time spent on Instagram as video at this point in most countries it's not the only thing we do we try to do it differently

than YouTube and Tik Tok uh where I think it's a bit more of a laid-back passive experience we try to create a bit more of a participatory leanin experience one where you're G to discover a real and then send it to a friend and then talk about it with another friend and um but it's still a huge part of what we do because it's a huge there's a huge amount of demand and at the end of the day we're a business we have to figure out a way to meet demand as demand moves around and

shifts actually think that's the biggest differentiator when we talk about video on Instagram and even when as creators when we're producing a video for Instagram that we know is going to be distrib on Instagram we look at it as a unit of conversation right like video on Instagram is so different because of the DMS it's huge it is such a different experience because you're essentially building something if it's successful then we see that the shares go up right and that suggests that its success is determined by someone watching it and needing to send it to

a friend to connect and it all happens on one platform right like the the expectation on Instagram is that I can create something and everyone from my niece or nephew to my parents to uh you know a Creator right a professional Creator can watch this and we find over and over again that that ends up being the mo the healthiest thing to value in the ranking models people ask a lot about the algorithms feel like it's a black box everyone's always feels like they deserve more reach than they get and sometimes that's the case but

one of the most important things to look at if you're trying to evaluate how your videos or anything is doing on Instagram is definitely the sends sends I would look at sends per reach um so of the people who saw it how many of them sent it to a friend um because that tends to be the content that does the best because it tends to drive the most value for the overall Community you see something that you think what what's one of your interests uh lately I've been getting into like gardening and planting food in

my backyard so all right right cool so let's say you guys I just harvested some basil is what I'm saying so my best friend is a has a huge Green Thumb so we're going to use him as IND this example instead of me because I would not like that thing at all but if you did a whole if you saw some amazing basil planting video maybe some sort of time lapse right and you sent that to my buddy hondro that is an interesting moment because you discovered something that someone made something creative something beautiful something

interesting and then you shared it with a friend in this hypothetical world you and HRA are also buds of course and then he he psyched to get it and that you might actually have a conversation about gardening basil whatever you like but then he came back to Instagram and then he actually probably checked out some more things and then maybe he saw an amazing you know soccer highlight and then he sent that to me and that's the flywheel um where yes you are discovering something it's consumption it's somewhat passive to see a video but then

you send it to a friend you start a conversation then that helps them discover more things themselves and they send it to someone else and that starts another conversation and that's why short video for us is so symbiotic with connecting people with their friends whereas in you know the world you come from of long form video is much less so because if you spend 20 minutes watching or 50 minutes watching a pod video you probably consuming a lot less content from Friends sending a lot less things to friends it's a cool amazing experience so is

going to the movies and watching a two and a half hour film um but it is less connected to and less symbiotic with part of our reason to be which is to connect people with friends it's also a huge ask to send someone like a hourong video right like that's a crazy ask to to message someone that but to send someone like a 15-second reel on Instagram totally it's an easy ask but you also see a lot more 15-second videos in 10 minutes then will watch long videos so is that the most important factor then

when it comes to reach shares per Impressions on on average on average yeah and is that a stat that like you give to us yeah you can look at shares and you can look at reach and then you divide those to we should make it and I have had this conversation many times with the team it's amazing how little influence I feel like I have on a day-to-day basis that we should um make more prominent in our insights tools what matters most so that we can help people focus on that more yeah I think you

need to dictate that to us as creators because I think that's something that YouTube does really well yeah our YouTube studio app tells us what matters yes and then we all optimize for those things tot and we understand it it's like clickthrough rate and average view duration and if we're optimizing for those and driving high percentage retention then the video does well couldn't agree more I did a video recently where I talked about sends per reach U but I only reached so many people so we got to get into the insights because a lot more

people yeah use the insights so what else is important there in that ranking system if we have sends per Impressions essentially when you go down the list I mean it it'll depend right so likes matter for sure but I think that those things can be misleading sometimes because most people will do one or the other they'll like or they'll send it's rare that I'll find something send it and then also like it and it's not that I wouldn't have liked it it's I got distracted by the send I think that liking is so interesting because

it's like sometimes you don't want to publicly like commit your name name to something like I don't want to attach my name to this video but I think it's funny uh and sometimes I'll do neither of those things I won't like it or send it so does does like watch time matter or length of time I spend on a on a reel yeah they definitely matter they matter a lot less than sense but they matter I think another thing that's important to take a look at though is less isn't a direct engagement rate is what

percentage of your reach was unconnected versus connected because those are really two parallel systems that mean so what percentage of your reach came from accounts that followed you versus what percentage of your reach came from accounts that don't follow you we just showed your content to them so your your connected reach should be much more people are going to on me in the comments here but it should be more stable than your unconnected reach right we try not to get between people and content from accounts that they follow so there's you know we don't do

demotions minus one or two exceptions like misinformation and we basically if we think you're interested in it we show it to you but when it comes to unconnected reach showing you something in explore or in the reals tab as you're going through content from accounts you do not follow there there's a lot of opportunity and there's a lot of responsibility on the opportunity side we should be able to help you discover things you didn't even know you loved I mean the whole promise of the internet is that we should be celebrating Niche interests I actually

heard you on one of your pods recently talking about on the crater business side focusing more on Niche but we shouldn't all listen to the same top 40 songs we should all be able to discover oh turns out I'm really into afro beats or something and you're really into some specific form of reg I don't know um the internet should help us do that and so what I think with recommendations is that should help with Niche interests and helping small creaters grow because it should help people discover accounts that normally wouldn't get discovered uh and

also there's way more unconnected content than there's connected content so you maybe follow I don't know a few hundred accounts you know maybe few thousand accounts most of them don't post something to feed in a given day yeah right so you know let's say there's a 100 or 200 things you could see in a given day there's over there's hundreds of millions of pieces of content posted today that are from accounts you do not follow a few of those might be really exciting for you and and is it like if I'm a Creator and I'm

thinking about how my videos surface on Instagram one is obviously in the connected feed people who follow me absolutely the other is going to be on explore yes and then the other if I'm making reals is in the essentially theab in the reals tab yeah right and so in those three places um what are are all those factors that we just talked about sends per reach uh length essentially average view duration on a video uh engagement like do those factors rank equally across those three Discovery platforms no not quite the same so in feed we

try to heavily preference content from accounts that you follow and accounts where you've got Mutual follows so if you and I follow each other we're probably friends in real life so that content will got it that content we will value more um in a number of ways one of is like we just shift more of the weight and the value model towards things that friends would do with each other's content like liking um whereas that matters Less in the context or something like that might matter Less in or commenting which would matter Less in an

unconnected content where if you're commenting on a public real you know it's just different it's a different place um that probably matters Less in unconnected surfaces like explore or reals uh but in General sends matters the most I think across the board and we're trying to share as much as we can like for a while they were very different system so maybe your explore was all about men's fashion and your real tab was all about gardening and that doesn't make any sense so we're trying to make sure we consolidate the infrastructure this is a bit

more technical so maybe less interesting so that as so the app behaves more like you would expect if you are really interested in something that you would see it in any recommendation surface I think it's technical but as professional creators it matters a lot to us totally right because the first thing we think about is how does our content surface in this environment and then we will make adjustments accordingly right absolutely how important are follower counts because I think a a common sort of frustration amongst some creators is okay I've put in this work over

a period of time to gain a level of followers right and I don't feel like I'm actually seeing the benefits of that yes right I'm not feeling the rise from that I'm not reaching them yeah so how what advice do you have for those types of creators and how do followers play into reach follow account is super important because you're GNA have a much better chance of reaching anybody who follows you than anybody who doesn't follow you so there's a really strong correlation between how many followers you have and how many people you reach that

said they matter less today in a world where there is more time spent looking at recommendations than before than they mattered you know five years ago now you might say stop leaning into recommendations like just focus on followers bring back old Instagram the issue with that is that the pie is smaller recommendations are driving more overall engagement yes that's good for us as a business uh we're connecting PE consumers with more content they're interested in so that's good for consumers but there's more reach to go around so it actually does lift average reach for all

creators um but it doesn't mean that your reach is more volatile because a larger percentage of your average reach will be through the recommendation system like I was looking at some of your reals plays counts this morning and there's you know you've got some that went nuts and some that are relatively small and some of them went nuts maybe because they're paid Partnerships and people paid for it but some of them were just totally organic uh I mean just candidly the ray band meta one was fully organic which like 60 million views this is insane

I haven't gotten anything that's like 30X anything I've ever done or maybe 10 but um which is awesome the thing we noticed though when what any of our reels that you know hit the the I would say three 4 million plus Mark which is only a few but the ones that have it's relatively immediate that they got they start getting shared yeah it's it's like within the first hour if we are getting if there people are sharing them in their stories at a high velocity then yeah that's what we're and that's a sneaky thing that

I think a lot of people don't realize is a lot of unconnected reach can come not in the surfaces we've talked about like explore or the reals tab but they can show up in stories or they can show up in in DMS if you share a real into a story or you share a real as a DM and someone watches that then you've got another impression of play and so sometimes it can come that way too A lot of those reals are about uh generative AI or about the rayan meta about like future Tech and

I think that you know plays to multiple human emotions one is like excitement you know there's like the excitement for the future isn't this crazy I got to share it with a friend the other is fear right like this is terrifying so I have to share it with a friend yeah um and I think when you tap into understanding like triggering an emotional reaction from someone um and ideally that emotional reaction is the desire to connect with someone else um that's where we've seen the the highest velocity ofip and this is I'll go into sort

of more my personal intuition as opposed to based on research but we don't support feed to feed reshares and even feed to stoies reshares can only happen once you can't reshare it again got it so almost all of what we would call reshares are DMS and I think that this is again my hypothesis this is I don't have rigorous research to back this up that what you want to share with one friend or with the group chat is tends to bias if you if you biased towards that type of content tends to be healthier than

something that you want the whole world to know about um and it's not that you know we have reposts on threads you know obviously Facebook has reshares Twitter has their own version everybody's got this it's not that things are bad but I do think they bias more towards like the whole world needs to know about this horrible thing that happened or this Injustice or it's a little bit less personal it's a little bit less Niche I most of the reals I sent I would never post to all my followers I've got a buddy in London

CA we' send each other ex almost exclusively soccer highlights from like 45-year-old dads making a shot on a Sunday leag that they'll never make again hyper very n the whole world sounds like it was made just for you awesome yeah exactly uh whereas you know with my brother it's like pretty off color dark standup comedy you know never would post that to all my followers you know so with my sister it's more Furniture Design and architecture so it's more Niche oriented and I think it's a little bit less Sensational on average and I think that

helps shift the tenor of the content that you experience on Instagram and I'm not saying all the content people see on Instagram as positive that is not true any major social network with hundreds of millions or billions of users it's going to have all sorts of negative energy in it but I think the average energy the average tenor of the content buys is more positive on Instagram for a few reasons and one of them is the content that rises to the top is the content you would share with an individual in a conversation not that

you would yell from a rooftop to the whole world that's really interesting like that what would you say is the competitive advantage of Instagram and real specifically when we look at like the world of short form video I look at it as Instagram reals and Tik Tok and it's not that creators can't post similar types of videos on both or the same video on both but what would you say is you or is Instagram's sort of superpower when it comes to Reals in relation to Tik Tok I think it's more creative freedom obviously Tik Tok

has been leaning into photos and trying to get into other formats like stories but they've had a lot less success there I'm not speaking poorly of Tik Tok they are phenomenal compe they do a number of things really well and there's a few things where I still feel like we're trying to catch up with them but in general I think our suite of tools which by the way sometimes can be a little intimidating or people get stressed by how many options there are I do think gives Critter more freedom to figure out how they want

to realize their goals and I think that's important we're also a larger platform worldwide and so that gives you more potential reach particularly if your content isn't uh is Glo is globally applicable which is hard in video I've actually seen you guys talk about this too where you know language is a challenge right if your if your content requires deep understanding of what's being said that's tough if someone doesn't speak the language um so there's a few things like that um but I think Tik tok's great I think they do really great work and they've

inspired us to get a lot better at what we call exploration based ranking so doing better ranking for smaller creators and helping them a chance of breaking out and just be really really reliably entertaining like it's like you know you're going to have a pretty good time if you open up that out yeah it almost scares me how good of a time it is yeah it it it's like uh I'm curious like in comparison and and maybe this is if you know the specifics or not but like how long would it take me on Instagram

to change my for you feed versus Tik Tok that on Tik Tok F it's way faster if I start watching cooking videos the next time I open Tik Tok I'm in the cooking world right we're still behind them on speed there you have to be careful though cuz sometimes you can be the opposite problem like explore is still a little Tippy it's like hey I watch one cooking video like ease up I don't need this to be all cooking all the time um that's not just about speed though that's about intensity so you might adapt

quickly but not go overboard and how much cooking in that example you use they're fa they're very fast um and we they're very fast in two ways one understanding your interests more quickly and adapting and two getting content that is going to be succeed to succeed really quickly and that helps them be culturally relevant we've been closing the Gap um pretty quickly on both of those fronts but there's still room to improve on those areas for us and then on the the note of language like we we talk about this all the time that if

you want to a successful short form piece of content it ideally should be able to be viewed with the sound off yes not even any language transcend language totally I was curious if you know how many people watch Instagram with their sound off is that a stat that you know H I don't have the I don't have a stat to share but last I checked it's not about people it's about time so like what percentage of video Impressions have sound on or off um and I think it was like it was roughly half half it

was roughly half I mean give or take 10% plus or minus but it was roughly half I think that's a really important thing for creators to think about yeah that's why captions are so important that's why you got to make sure your captions are visible in the feed not just in the full screen viewer one of the classic mistakes is put your captions and you don't even see them until you expand the video and then by then you you probably have S on anyway but ideally you're like similar to YouTube where we think a lot

about title thumbnail and packaging the packaging of a short form piece of content is the first frame yes and the visual hook right and so the the first frame and the visual hook should be able to beod without language that I think is like the most important piece of advice I totally agree but there's also ways to do it in the in the full video that aren't necessarily like not using language like I remember reading um oh man what was his name Malcolm gladwell's book I think on strangers and like not not being able to

trust strangers and there's a whole section in there I forget why it's even connected to that idea about the show Friends and how tons of people around the world have learned to speak English watching friends cuz you can basically know exactly what's happening without understanding any of the words cuz the acting is so over the top expressive inter I'm not trying to offend any friends lovers out there I know a couple people life are like passionate about friends friends is great but you can kind of know what's going on because it's almost like a caricature

of a response um and you can think about that in the content right so I'm not saying you have to make giant facial expressions but just watch your video and see if someone can get the without actually understanding every word and as you'll know and if they can it's going to have a wider appeal so w with Instagram being so uh DM focused what I've also noticed is like my younger cousins use snap a lot for messaging which is amazing I I like it's incredible the um how prominent it is as a messaging app with

young people it's very strong with young people and I I was curious just we we talked about Tik Tok I think about snap and I think about just how young people are using the internet today versus when you know this was the earlier version of social it felt like the battle was for the user base is that correct like like trying to get as many users as possible like what is the what what is the the war you're fighting or the battle you're fighting today with the other competitors like what is the competition for it's

for a number of different things I mean it is at some level for attention right we are an advertising based business and that business is going to be proportional to the amount of attention that's spent on the platform got it but it's also for cultural relevance I I think a lot about what decisions do we need to make that don't necessarily grow the pie but I think will be good for the business over the long term so I mean one thing that is controversial is we focus on creators and we don't focus on Publishers we

don't try to prevent Publishers from using our platform but we build features for creators we don't build features for Publishers I don't have teams that goal on P any any production that includes Publishers if I can avoid it I have team's goal on Creator production can you define the difference yeah so a Creator is an individual that creates original content with some level of commercial intent that's a I don't mean necessarily making money it could just be like sure part of what you do you're trying to grow because you're trying to achieve something on the

platform um so Publishers are you know brands magazines newspapers doesn't have to just be news um and there's there's amazing content from Publishers on the platform but they're not individuals um they are creating original content and they definitely have commercial intent and we focus on creators because we believe con power is going to continue to shift from institutions to individuals across Industries we've seen this in sports we've seen this in news we've seen this in music we've seen this in every vertical but just think about how relevant as athletes are right now relative to the

play relative to the teams that they play for sure and how different that was 20 30 years ago with very few exceptions a lot of people's Allegiance is sometimes primarily to a player now not to a team that's insane if you think about sports fans when I was a kid and so we just think that that is that shift is going to continue and we also see that in the data creaters drive on average more engagement than publisher does people want to see the world through the eyes of another individ idual that they relate to

or that they look up to more than they want to consume content from a publisher that they feel is hyper processed and produced and um designed for them if if that Trend keeps up uh what does Instagram have to do to continue to make creators happy I think a lot about when uh Kylie Jenner shared that post of Instagram Instagram again and that was in relationship to like some pretty good memes about me that was fun but like if you know LeBron has more followers than the Lakers right like if that Trend continues for creators

yes what does Instagram have to do to keep creators happy in the next five 10 years creators are tough to keep happy um but there's a number of different things that we know that they care about and we work hard contrary to popular belief I'm trying to keep them happy um one is clearly you know is reach and it's not I do think reach is a means to an end it's not an end and of itself and I think too many people just focus on reach for reach's sake but you want reach should be growing

over time and ideally relatively stable that's very hard to deliver on any platform that guarantees you stable reach is lying uh that doesn't mean that platforms aren't working on it and trying to give you more reach and trying to figure out how to grow the pie but pure stability is really it's not possible even if everyone just did chronological feeds everywhere but that matters a lot um I it also Matters How safe you feel on the platform do you feel like you can be yourself um or the part can you share the part of stuff

that you want to share um so that's about protection it's about dealing with you know any antagonistic behaviors or bullying or harassment but safety matters a lot um Revenue matters a lot but actually to a very small subset of creators the vast majority of creators are very small and they're too small to monetize in a meaningful way and so yes they care about monetization they want to hear about monetization but it's actually not the thing that they can or should really focus on because if you have 2,000 followers it's not really going to be the

thing that you spend your time on is figuring out how to grow your following not try to make money from 2,000 followers um they also care a lot about being able to connect with and interact with both the their fans but also other creators so we try to also figure out ways to facilitate connections between creators and creators and fans actually that's another thing that we do really particularly well that we kind of loed into is with DMS if I just I'm a fan of you and I follow you and then you figure who I

am and then you you can text me on Instagram and it goes into my inbox so I know people in Hollywood who just like end up making real connections with people who become lifelong business partners because they like their stuff on Instagram and it's not even they're not even digital n of creators it's like a film scorer or a director um so those are the things we try to improve and um obviously um we've got room to improve across the board as ases everybody I think it's interesting to hear that uh revenue is not as

important and sure for for a Creator who maybe has 2,000 followers it's like not something that's coming their way when we told our friends that we were coming here who are primarily YouTube creators that we were going to be sitting down with you they were so interested in Revenue I think for us like we come from this culture of Revenue share yeah and I know Facebook does it and I'm curious like where does Instagram lie yeah Revenue share I'll talk about Revenue share in a second but you should also tell me if I'm wrong that's

just the research that we have suggests what what creators care about I think for me the the challenge is that I don't think we can blanket use the term creators anymore and I and I think specifically on Instagram I think it's harder to use that term I think the term is so broad that it's challenging to have it encapsulate everyone in the category right and and when it comes to Instagram like you know my parents are on Instagram they post content on Instagram and they probably have a thousand or 2000 that we have so many

cousins Indian family so it's like we have so many cousins we probably have 2,000 followers on YouTube there's more a divide between like Creator and consumer line is Instagram it's way more it's just like everyone everyone can be considered a Creator and so there for me if we look at it as like a a pyramid of like the emerging Creator you know as the base of the pyramid the vast majority on Instagram is going to be an emerging or aspiring Creator someone who knows how to make good stuff but they haven't figured out how it

can become their their full-time income then you have like the professional Creator group who's making a living right and then you have the top tier which is probably like uh A-list celebrity and and hyper large scale creators at the top of that if if we're talking about the Creator pyramid there and the base is not gonna care about revenue or maybe they care about it but it's not going to be a factor for them yet yes but the next Notch and up care a ton care car to to I think there's a bit of for

me on Instagram that I've accepted the fact that the way we monetize is we build an audience and then we it's a part of our broader advertising business it's not something we split with the platform yeah but we're able to sell you know native advertising ourselves Instagram yeah which makes a ton of sense that's actually last I best we can tell well north of A5 billion industry is people doing brand deals off platform on in and then Distributing that content on Instagram so and I do I do totally understand the revenue matters a ton particularly

for large creators and large creators are disproportionately important right because they reach more people um on rev share because I I want to make sure I'm not St in the question it's something that we're working on it's something that I think is just fundamentally more difficult with short form video though I do think shorts is doing decently um but with long form video Everything is a bit more straightforward um particularly attribution so if you watch a 20-minute video and you see three ads you know what percentage you want to share and it's very clear who

those who that share goes to um whereas with short firm video if you watch 50 videos and you see 15 ads who gets those dollars um so attribution is tricky in and of itself but the bigger problem is that we haven't figured out a way to do it that isn't just burning cash um so we are running tests for what we call bonuses which are essentially performance-based incentives so you know we will pay you to create more content and then people create more content but then we measure does that actually increase the revenue for the

app and so that we can actually have money to share back and we are finding that it is much easier to make those programs Roi positive for photos than for videos and one of the reasons is photos are higher monetization efficiency because you you get more add Impressions because you look at photos for less time but another is that per dollar when you pay a Creator to create something new they will create more incremental photos and incremental videos because videos are harder to make and really interesting the incremental content they make is lower quality than

the average quality but that drop is much lower for photos than for reals so they'll make another reel but they will only make one and it's way worse than the Reel that they would have created otherwise um or the first reel that they would have created either way and so we are trying to figure out okay what can we do about that how can we get this working because to me I need that program to make enough money so that we can pay creators and have those checks be credible if I send you guys a

$112 check it's probably going to make you think worse of us than if we just didn't have a program and so we're iterating and we're iterating in Japan and Korea and the us to try to get these programs on their video side working so that we can then scale them up but for us to do that it's going to need to be it's going to need to not burn money it's going to need to be uh get to a place where the eligibility can be I hope ideally uh public so you know why you're allowed

to be in the program in the first place and the checks need to be credible um which probably comes down to cpms at the end of the day yeah I think credibility is the most important because I don't think you know if we got a $12 check I don't think I would be I would feel disrespected or anything like that I would just want to know how did that happen yeah but it might discourage oh it might discourage but if I knew if I knew there was a clear path towards like hey this is why

it was $12 based off the viewership you got here's what you can do to increase it right I may feel better about the trick though is it's not just about your viewership it's about the replacement value so let's say you made you made 10 re through the program and they all got really good views but if you hadn't made it we would have had just as much engagement from him that was in paid for then from an Instagram business perspective the the ROI is negative 100% so if we paid you a th000 bucks making up

numbers now for 10 re and the replacement value was Z you would look at it your reals and be like they all got 500,000 views and these are the cpms you owe me X and it's like yes but from a business perspective if we hadn't paid you $1,000 and we would have had we would have made the exact same amount of Revenue then then we've actually just burned $1,000 and so it's yes we should we should show you why um but My worry is that let's say I show you why to the degree I can

and let's say I even pay you more more than 100% M let's say it's $1,000 and I pay I pay you $1,000 and we and we only and we only made an incremental $900 you know I've lost $900 and you've got a $100 check and you probably are going to think that I'm being cheap because I'm only paying you a 100 bucks for 10 videos that got half a million views each so It's Tricky and I'm not trying to say our job is hard of course our job is hard and we've got great jobs and

I'm very grateful for them yeah I'm just saying that the program has to be sustainable because if it's not if we're burning cash when things get tight when the economy goes up and down and AD dollars go up and down and a lot of our business is just exposed to macroeconomics at this point then when we cut marketing budgets like one of the things that we're going to cut is a program that is literally burning money and I need the program to be stable right I can't have a program this year and take it away

for everyone and take it away next year and then bring it back to year after that's just jerking you around and you all particularly the large craters you're a business so how much money you make matters but so does the consistency of those dollars so that you can plan accordingly you know I think we had it's really interesting actually I I didn't anticipate that answer from you I think uh what you just said makes a ton of sense uh and I think about when we first started we were making such Niche content on YouTube that

AdSense and revenue share was nominal for the first n years of us being on YouTube and so we learned how to build a business without Revenue share and so when even when I think about Instagram like I I do think that now the culture and to look out out the next five 10 years like solving some level of Revenue share for for video is important or some level of platform monetization but largely because of what you just talked about from a macroeconomic standpoint I think all creators need to solve if consistency is important the ads

business is actually not the best business to be consist it's inherently volatile it's inherently volatile so then if you're building a a a business on top of you know Instagram then platform monetization would not be the path for your most consistent check I think we want to feel valued because we feel valued by other platforms and I think YouTube figuring out the the the shorts Revenue sharing model in this like large pool um it feels like a nice step in that direction I was curious what you thought about that of like the the model that

they've implemented there I think it's a I think it's a good model I don't know if it's working or not sure from a business perspective because I don't know maybe they're just subsidizing their shorts business with their long form video business or with their search business because they want to grow in short form video because I mean Tik Tok hurt us in 2020 2021 but it hurt them way more so it's not unre unreasonable as a business to take a loss in order to grow market share um and assume that you're going to figure it

out later which they might be doing um and to be clear like they are best in class at rev share but rev share is not the only way to make money as a Creator whereas Tik Tok is best in class at discovering small craters and helping them pop but it's not Best in Class at rep share it's not Best in Class in stability of reach in fact that ability to pop is sort of inversely correlated with stability of reach because it's more volatile by definition and so I think they're doing I think they're doing good

work I think I know a lot of people who work there who just do good stuff I don't know if they're subsidizing it or if they're just better at it than we are or what or what's going on but also YouTube isn't Google or alphabet's main business search is their main business and whenever you are in an adjacent business like I'm sure they care about their p&l and I think you guys interviewed Neil before but it's not the same pressure uh like whereas Instagram yes Facebook and Instagram our like sister apps like we're both driving

most of the revenue for the company in order to subsidize all the other longer term bets that we're making so one thing is Facebook video we have friends who their number one yeah Revenue Source people underappreciate it is Facebook instream ads yeah it's huge it's a huge source of Revenue and a lot of that is because they're posting you know relatively longer form content 3 to six maybe 10 minute videos on Facebook and the content's engaging and I'm surprised always when we meet a Creator who's like yeah I make most of my money from Facebook

Facebook is much bigger than Instagram worldwide if you just look at Raw minutes per day or raw hours per day I do think though it's a different app in a number of ways they don't have DMS in it um we have a much stronger position and a lot more on in a lot of countries not all countries around friends sharing products like stories not just DMS and I just think I think of like connecting friends is an adjacent thing to Short from video and short from video is an adjacent thing to Long Fromm video but

long firm video and connecting friends aren't adjacent and it pains me to because I love podcasts uh watching them listening to them doing them um I actually did a couple interviews with creators over the last couple weeks and it pains me sometimes that long form content just doesn't have a real great home on Instagram but if our core thing is about connecting people over creativity I can't get enamored with the longform video business and then lose our core identity people think and they give us criticism and it's fair sometimes that sometimes we lose our way

or forget who we are but the reason why I am not interested in pursuing long form video in a meaningful way is because I don't want to erode our our it's not even our business like our cor our heart like our core reason to exist I do think a a piece of short form vertical content right now is one of the highest margin branded content pieces in a Creator business like we've experienced it right like when we do a short form vertical video campaign typically the ad dollars are there right there's there's more ad dollars

that have shifted towards short form vertical video now the piece of content can also be posted across platform uh different platforms and it's easier to make than a long form YouTube video and so in this moment right now the short form vertical video branded content business is probably the highest margin video business for creators that obviously is dependent on your size and scale but I think in in large part that is the highest margin business right now as a Creator I believe that you did a video on uh pod recently I forgot what the name

of the Creator was but they starting to charge and they got a big backlash they wanted to they they put a lot of their content yes and so you were talking about this sort of space yeah I think there are things that long form is better at and I think there are things that are short form are better at but from an advertiser's perspective I think it depends on what the advertiser's outcome is right so just think about branded content in general even in the podcast world right you've got one extreme which is basically direct

response advertising ag1 subscriptions where they take a cut of the subscription and then you get the other end which is like much more sort of like almost like you're playing in like the B2B space like acquired you know and they're getting each deal that those guys get is a big deal for them they spend a lot of time nurturing those deals they have a few deals but those deals are pretty solid and they almost all of those guys who sign up stick with them um and then there's a whole range of things in between so

if you're trying to reach a small Niche audience and have a really deep stable connection you know I think acquired long form type stuff whether it's podcasts or otherwise maybe YouTube videos is probably better creating a deeper richer more enduring long-term connection for sure yeah if you're trying to do like um you know Dr maybe it doesn't matter because you just want to get that that one conversion or maybe you're trying to do brand awareness and there there it's really about just getting a larger type of funnel so it's not about the niche it's just

like you want to reach as many people as possible to let them know about toothpaste or whatever it is that you're selling something that has really a broad addressable market and so as a Creator yes you should think about your costs a lot and how much does it take and cost you to make a photo versus a short form video versus a long form video but as you think about your Advertiser deals that you work with and if you are privileged enough to be able to be picky you should understand what kind of business they

are and what they're trying to get out um what they're trying to get out of advertising and how much your content or the Deep different types of content you could create align with those Advertiser interests and I think that's a level of sophistication that's hard if you spend all of your time just trying to figure out how to make something that pops uh which I which I get which I totally get I think you have to spend have had spent some time in your life which we did fortunately sitting in those rooms with advertisers and

understanding and empathizing with their position yeah and I think once you can understand that you can understand how they fit into your world one of the things that we think from our side because this is obviously you know a multi-sided Marketplace so primarily two-sided and then we're a platform is in the world of branded content if that's the primary way that creators make money on Instagram one of the interesting things it's just there's no measurement there's like so little measurement people don't advertisers don't necessarily know what they're going to get yes you can be like

go to momentus elements.com Adam and like hopefully we can like do the attribution that way but for the most part there's very little measurement um in that world my take is that larger names tend to get overpaid and smaller names get underpaid because the advertisers advertisers spend more based on intuition because they don't have numbers to go off of that's a distortion in the market that scares me because I feel like any Distortion will inevitably get corrected at some point and we'll probably get blamed for it and so I want to figure out how we

can help that the whole industry move forward that's one of the reasons why I like partner ads so much is not because they're a potential Revenue stream for us though they are but because they allow branded content to have proper measurement and if we do that if more of this industry or more of the Branded content ecosystem is measured my hypothesis is that you will see dollars shift from the largest creators to more Niche creators you might sell more of whatever you're trying to sell by reaching 100 small creators than running one big check for

the same amount of Total Money to one big Creator but right now you would never do that because it's impossible to manage can we help that through measurement through connections through the Creator Marketplace is I think something that we're still trying to crack could you explain partner ads Yeah so basically way a partner ad works is you do what you would normally do so you would like who's one of your oh we we talked about Canon before so let's say Canon was like we want you to make some content uh we want to do some

ads for you uh with with you for our cameras you would make the creative and then you would make it so that they could use your creative as an ad to people who don't even follow you yep and it just basically allows you to own the creative the content is attributed to your account but it can get distributed through our ad system and so it gets all of the measurement of our ad system and all that infrastructure um which helps advertisers understand demand understand demographics understand conversions um because the bread and butter of our advertising

business is not brand advertising though that's a good amount of money it's direct response advertising where measurement is everything uh and then Canon will know all right I wrote These Guys a check like what did I get for it and like that could be scary yeah yeah or that could be amazing because if you are if if if they realize that they paid you I'm making up random numbers now $110,000 but they made 35 you know that's then you're worth more than you're getting paid got to increase our rate yeah but then but you would

never know unless we do this so I love I I actually love that about Instagram because it makes the advertising more native to the platform right like the advertising is Creator oftentimes it's creators in sponsored post which is great because then it's like native advertising to the platform I actually think that's where YouTube is behind right now and I don't think it's the platform's fault I actually think it's the probably the industry at the moment where they're running TV spots on YouTube where if you were running ads on YouTube with YouTube creators in the pre-roll

that felt more native I actually think there'd be more effective ads yeah um and I think those are those are really effective on Instagram I do think the more measurable advertising gets the less it values General kind of brand lift and association with creators that's true but I think that's mostly true because brand lift is harder to measure it's it's you can't measure it really but there's like a I guess you can through like surveys and you just need a lot of scale to be able to do it without the air bars being so Bonkers

that it's not even worth doing yeah um but to be clear I mean there's a lot of AD dollars right now on brand marketing with very little measurement I mean just think about how TV works yeah uh I mean there's measurement it's not no measurement but it's not have you ever met someone who's a neelon house no no I have not never met I've never gotten that phone call I've never gotten the call I'd think I'd be a great neelon man would terrible actually have one question on paid partnership when when we click like paid

partnership or branded content but that the advertiser doesn't boost the content use it as sponsorship does anything happen in the ranking system to our content nothing no no we don't I mean it would be really problematic if that decreased your reach because then we'd have people avoiding marking things as paid and by the way in some countries it's law like you can get in real trouble in Germany for instance for getting paid and not marking something as paid so much so that a lot of people in Germany creators Mark things that as paid that aren't

paid worried that there's like there might be some maybe they got a gift like a year ago and it's gonna get they're gonna get in trouble they do hashtag ad on all this yeah yeah yeah I'm curious you mentioned smaller creators what are some sort of metrics or talking points that smaller creators could use to convince advertisers and maybe it's you know agencies who are using this information but how does that smaller Creator get that deal I think it's probably about being more clear about who your audience is and why that audience is disproportionately valuable

to that Advertiser so you know let's use I don't I don't love the example of supplements because there's so many Shady actors in that world but it's an easier example like if you only have a few thousand followers but they're really passionate and they're all about like biohacking and health stuff then like they are way more valuable to a thorn supplement um Advertiser than the average person and so you shouldn't just care as The Advertiser about the number you should care about how much How likely in this case this hypothetical example those followers are to

want to buy your product um so it's about understanding your Niche and why that Niche is disproportionately valuable to that Advertiser is probably the most straightforward way do you do you care if a Creator is considered an Instagram Creator in the same way that I think you know YouTube creators just have a brand to them right that's a YouTube Creator or a Tik to or a Tik tocker like you guys are YouTubers yeah we're YouTubers right like I know I wanted to say it a lot at some point but like do you care about like

creators being considered Instagram creators I care about our cultural relevance and both to the general population and to creators I think that I don't think that we should ever do anything to discourage YouTubers or Tik tokers who are primarily on those platforms from being successful that would be literally just bad for our business um but I do care that there is a critical mass of crators that have an affinity for and a loyalty to our platform which is one of the reasons why I care so much about small creators in general I think it's way

more practical to help a new generation of creators grow on your platform and therefore have some more affinity and loyalty to your platform than it is to pull someone who's had 15 years of success on YouTube and get them to switch their primary that's just swimming Upstream um that's another reason why I think small crators are super important and why we' trying to do more and more to benefit them um but I think if we are only a secondary platform for most crators that's probably a bad place to be in best case we can best

we can tell we are a larger we're the largest platform for creators so there's the most creators active on our platform but obviously we've talked about a couple things where other platforms are better um but I do but the sentiment is not quite as high um so people well probably hearing this as a crater and if you're upset about your reach you're probably going to think the sentiment is really bad that is true there is definitely a group of people who are really upset about reach uh it doesn't come it isn't like the over doesn't

overwhelm sentiment for the entire population um it's in some sense a very loud and I'm not trying to throw any shade here but a very loud minority that we're trying to figure out how to address and we need to do better by but actually the average sentiment around Instagram for the average Creator is quite high but it's not quite as high in certain countries as some of the competition and I I'd like to close that Gap yeah I feel like um I'm curious like how do you get that next crop of creators excited about Instagram

I think they have to have find you have to they have to find success on the platform yeah but they also have to maintain that success so more small creators will find some success on Tik Tok than any other platform but often it's like a flash in the pan and then it goes away and that's not really helpful because you haven't built anything sustainable um whereas on Instagram and on YouTube it's harder to break in I think we aren't as good at valuing small smaller creators it's harder from a technical reason you've got less data

but uh so it's a little bit harder to break in so we're trying to find the right balance make it possible for new talent to break out and and grow while not losing so much not getting not not having reach become so volatile that your follower account doesn't matter and people say it doesn't matter on Instagram but it really matters in a way that it doesn't matter nearly as much on some of the other apps I think that's a challenge that creators have with short form content no matter where it is is building brand right

if you're making long form content it is difficult but if someone chooses to spend 20 minutes with you they will remember you tomorrow there are times when with short form content because you can consume so much in such a short amount of time that you may not actually remember the Creator you just saw even if you loved what you just saw right it feels like it served the purpose of entertainment for you like that lean back experience I don't know if I agree so yes if you were going to compare someone who watched one 15-second

video end to end and one 15 video 15minute video sorry 15 minute video end to end so clearly you're going to have more memory more affiliation with the with the um 15 minute video I don't know that means that on average the average sord creator has a harder time building a brand because the average short fir Video Creator can make many more videos for the in the same amount of time for the same amount of money um so you might mean you get more at bats I think it's what makes it harder to stand out

on the first for as first impression are surrounded yeah yeah I will say though like I I think about and Colin and I talk about this like every platform needs model citizens right because the younger crop that comes in they need to see what success looks like totally YouTube is you know with YouTube we have the Mr Beast the Ryan Tran the Michelle car and right now when I think about Instagram and I think about a short form Creator who has stood out quite a bit I think about Haley yeah uh Haley Bailey she produces

so much content unbelievable the amount of content on every platform out of this world she's not like exclusive To Us by any searches imag yeah that is an incredible feat truly but to put out that much I think she is extremely recognizable and what Colin's mentioning of like building a brand on the platform she's built an Inc I think about Keith Lee as well who really long F reviews you love these niches which is amazing uh and I do think that there are some you know what I would consider model citizens emerging they're not necessarily

exclusive to the platform or uh but I'm curious if you have that feeling if you have that sense of like that's something that Instagram needs to inspire the younger crop I think we need that I think you need models to have other or success stories for the newer creators to look up to we do see that more creators have us as our primary PL as our primary platform than any other platform and all the off platform surveys we do so you're more likely if you're a Creator to say um Instagram is my primary than any

other platform but also at the same time every time we measure the number of creators that use multiple platforms goes up because the Creator Community is getting more Savvy you don't want to have all of your risk in one basket um so I do think that that is a hard position to maintain long term but it is a um there is a certain amount of cache and cultural relevance that comes with Instagram that we have to fight to maintain um because I think that's also can easily um fall so it does matter it does matter

that you have success stories to prove that it can you can realize your aspirations on the platform because if you can't see anybody that you can relate to who succeeded on the platform you're not going to believe that you can the some of the early success stories on Instagram from when I remember us building our career were a lot of the like meme accounts or the aggregator accounts yeah and I know you recently made an announcement around originality and a commitment to originality I was wondering if you could explain that controversial G to get a

lot of heat from the aggregators coming up so I do want to separate memes and um aggregators sure because you can be an original Meme creator there a lot of great meme creators out there so the idea behind originality is that we should make sure that more value if we can flows to the original creators that make something than those who find that content and then um repackage it and aggregate it from other original content creators and that if we don't do that we will just erode more and more trust with the original content creator

Community which will be bad for us over the long run it'll manifest as negative sentiment people leaving the platform maybe they stay on the platform but they're quick to um criticize us nobody defends us and I think reputation matters um even though it might actually not be beneficial it might be beneficial but it might not probably won't be beneficial to the business in the short run so this is a classic challenge in running a business of short-term long-term trade-offs are you willing to eat a long a short-term hit because you think you're going to be

in a better place longterm even if you might not ever be able to measure it because what you're in this case you're doing is you're reducing the risk of a negative outcome and so if it doesn't happen you never knew that it would have um so what we work on is meas defining originality and there's different buckets there's original there's mixed original so if I take your video and then I like do a green screen on top and I talk about it that's mixed original and then there's unoriginal or and mixed unoriginal so I just

like take someone else's and i' post it can we get good at classifying that content and can we um figure out how to responsibly privilege the original content and I don't think we want to boost I don't like boosts like if you just boost something it's bad because it's just tends to be opaque it's a little bit like no one knows what's happening behind the curtain and it doesn't feel very transparent so what we're trying to do is in some sense riskier is not recommend content from aggregators so if you follow an aggregator because you

love the and there are a lot of amazing aggregators out there great you'll see their content in your feed if we think you're interested in it we're not going to do anything to get between you and that content if you're not seeing it it's because we could be wrong but we think something else is more interesting to you that you follow but if we show you content from an aggregator from an account you don't follow then that's much more on us and so I actually said this before there's more opportunity and there's more responsibility um

so if we if you see something Shady from like a friend of yours that's like on your shady friend if we show you something Shady from a random person that's really on us uh so there's more count there's more risk and more accountability but there's also more opportunity I think it is reasonable for us to say we're not going to amplify we're not going to recommend content from aggregators um but we are going to recommend content from creators because we are invested in creators over the next five or 10 years so let's just say like

practical example is a sports highlight aggregator posts a high school dunk but the original creator of that video yes was one of that uh basketball player's friends who was filming it yes they filmed it it got reposted on a on a big Sports account yes so is the suggestion there that instead of showing it from the sports account it would show it from the original post that is one thing we do okay we call that direct replace okay so if we can find the original then we just swap it out um which is pretty nuts

so it's almost as like a reshare like would it still look like it's from the aggregator no I was saying it would be the original video in your feed again this is in a recommendation it would be weird if it was just in the connected context you're just looking at stuff that we think you think are going to be interesting in the reals tab this aggregator found this amazing dunk if we know if we can find the original post of that dunk we're just going to swap it out and show you the original because in

the feed yeah yeah got it you know and how do you find that is that like the content ID system similar to YouTube yeah very similar so in in our experience with Content ID and like original content specifically whether it's YouTube Instagram Tik Tok most of our content is cut in a different way than we would cut it it's it's meaningfully transformed yeah um so it doesn't get picked up in a in a Content ID system right it's a clip of us sitting with Mr Beast but there's Now new b-roll on top of it so

that's not gonna get picked up right the most viewed Colin and Samir videos on the internet are not made by us yeah yeah right by other people and for us in in where we are in business I'm completely fine with that that is more visibility for us the internet is better at cutting clips from our videos than we are there will be clips from this of you that are cut by other people right that are just crowdsourced um you know and I I don't really have a problem with that I think that's okay um and

I it's it's hard to find the original Source when and we can't always find it mostly it will be transformed in some way shape or form yes right but that's why we can't just rely on Direct replace so direct replace only gets us so far what we look at is what percentage of recommendations so what percentage of photos and videos that you're seeing from accounts you do not follow are original or unoriginal and we want we want to grow the percentage that is original there will always be recommendations that are unoriginal because we're never going

to be perfect and that's I want to be clear I like at our skills it's not possible doing the direct replace or that swap only gets you so far um because maybe the original was posted on YouTube or was posted on Tik Tok talk we then we can't know who's is the original um so what we look at is does this account tend to post original content or does this piece of content look like an original piece of content so you look at things like how similar is this video to the last n videos that

this account has posted aggregators tend to have much more variance my stuff my grid is boring as hell you just it's just my mug over and over and over again right so it's not that hard for a classifier to tell that my account is Po in original content uh or that any given video on my account is probably original if it's me again um sorry if you follow me um whereas if it's an aggregator there's a lot more variance and so it's much more likely that the classifier will predict that this thing is UN original

and if it does we're not going to demote it from anybody who follow to anybody from anybody who follows you but we're not going to recommend it proactively to someone who doesn't follow you and so we do this at the content and the actor level and we want to let you know so if we think you're a Content aggregator we want to let you know that and we'll put that in account status so you can see okay you're non- recommendable not because you post anything problematic but because you're an aggregator and we're not recommending aggregators

and and that way you can do something about it maybe you need to you need to do more of your own spin on things add your b-roll add your commentary add your I mean look if you take my photo and you make it into a meme of me with some really mean mean comment on on the top that is original yeah wow whether or not I like it you may have just asked for that with that video I get it anyway you should see my DMs it's a thing so another thing that we're seeing specifically

this week uh is Instagram tagging and classifying content as made with AI yes and that is uh you know something that I noticed a week ago and I was like huh that's strange I this photo does not look like it was made with AI but maybe it's maybe they did some fill on Photoshop and and posted it on here there probably something really light like that is that how that works like and how does it it's just the metadata on the on the image so we're trying to lean on the on industry standards here so

there's going to be more and more content that is generated with AI over time and is going to be more and more difficult to identify it there is no way we're going to be able to programmatically identify everything that is posted on Instagram as that was that did use AI as having used AI long term so I want to be clear like the goal here is wouldn't we know for us to be transparent so that people can make educated decisions about what to believe and not by the way it might have no relevance because if

it's just a funny video then it's a or funny picture doesn't really matter if it's made with AI or not necessarily so we're trying to lean on industry standards here and so there is a Adobe has I forget what the name of the metadata property or attribute is but they Mark files that used AI in Photoshop as having used Ai and then we pick that up and we mark it and um some of the other apps are doing the same thing um what's happening is people are doing benign things in Photoshop that are technically using

AI it might not even be generative fill it might be like I don't know maybe their stamp tool uses AI you know you know because AI is just a core technology doesn't mean totally fabricated image and so it's getting marked because they're being conservative in what they're marking in the file and then we're just respecting the files mark saying hey AI was used to make this and then it's possible that the creator doesn't even know that it was Ai and the tool that they used so we have to figure this out because clearly this is

frustrating and not the ideal experience um and I'm not sure where we're going to land because it's this isn't just an Instagram or issue it's an industry issue and I think if we do our own thing and everyone does their own thing then and you don't have an industry standard I think the whole internet is less well off um but we have figure rap ing problem I would say with the election it's has to be so trusted in the event that something gets posted without that made with AI but it is in some way altered

and it just wasn't picked up then you're in a real situation where people are believing something but that's also going to happen like right now if you make an image you know with a number of different of these uh diffusion models and it doesn't Mark and a lot of them don't mark it in the in the metadata like we don't have a way to tell we can build classifiers to trust try to detect it looking at the typical types of artifacts you might see but that is an arms race and we will never have full

coverage I want to be super clear there will be content on all platforms that is made by Ai and is not marked as AI because the platform wasn't able to detect it because the person who made it specifically tried to avoid that and that just means that yes I think we should do our part to detect what we can to label what we can but people also just have to be Discerning readers or consumers because this isn't an Instagram thing this is an internet thing you're going to have to assume that it's possible that someone

made something um using these technologies that was by the way possible before gender of AI it's just way more possible now yeah it's way easier now I think what makes it harder on Instagram is that Instagram is this wide array of content where I can open Instagram and see that you know one of my friends from high school is having a baby and then I can immediately go into like geopolitical issues and then immediately go into watching a creator that I like and I think the context switching in my brain of what's truth and not

truth or real and not real is harder in a platform where I'm consuming such a wide variety of what's serious what's entertainment what's comedy no I agree with that I mean the cognitive load in a platform where the content has more variation and not just substance but like topic and how you should approach it you know how I should approach a video of my my brother posts of his 2-year-old girl is very different than how I should approach like a news clip from a uh you know I don't know about the election or about a

war um so yes I I totally agree those can happen in a matter of you know seconds they could be adj they could be adj less than a second yeah yeah W with that in mind do you have any thoughts around you know like I guess the impact on Mental Health the impact on you know a young Generation Um and how much they should or shouldn't be using the platform I think parents know best for each kid I'm a I'm a dad I have three boys but they're to Young use Instagram they're 86 and4 and

I think that platforms like Instagram can bring an immense amount of value H to anybody in including kids or teens I should say but they can also be problematic um just like anything can I think that looking at too many unrealistic images in a magazine when I was a kid is also can be problematic but it can also be inspiring it depends on who I am and also where I am in that moment maybe the same magazine or the same platform or Instagram in this case could be really great for me today and could be

really problematic for me tonight um based on where I am emotionally right now so the thing that we try to do is one make sure that we focus as much as we can on addressing parents concerns we get a lot of scrutiny and a lot of incoming compliance requirements and we engage a lot with policy makers and we're going to do our best to comply with local laws and make sure we're taking feedback from policy makers but I care more about what parents think and what um child experts think and so we primarily try to

P prioritize our work uh based on those interests and then to build tools to empower them right so one of the things that we have built and that we're actually doubling down on right now is tools to help parents shape the experience into what they think is best for their kid um so maybe they want to have blackout periods where I don't want my kid using Instagram in the E week weekday evenings because it's homework time or I want to give my kid an hour limit um you know how can we help them shape that

experience um without giving the teen a really strong incentive just to lie to their parents and to us because you could always pretend you're older than you are or have a second account that you don't tell your parents about so it's a kind of a a really difficult balance because if what we build for parents is to restrictive teens are Savvy they'll just work around it so we have to figure out how to do it in a way that can address parents needs without pushing teens so far that they're just gonna lie I'm curious on

that note the the law that Rona santis passed in Florida when he passed that I remember like watching the news and Comedians and commentators and people saying like wow I'm on the far left and I can't believe I agree with like something Ronda santis said in Florida which is that like you have to be above the age of 14 before you can use social media you need your parents permission uh at age 14 and 15 and I was wondering like is that even realistic like is that something that can be done I mean we can

build it teens can lie we will build it I mean we're looking to comply I do think the situation in the states is complicated because now states are doing their own thing and the more variance there is the harder it is for any platform to comply and actually execute well and so you're going to have more and more mistakes and more and more things s to the cracks I think it would be good for there to be parental consent I think though that has to be an industrywide thing um it can't just apply to one

platform or another I think it would be good for it to be the same for all 50 states I think we'll just make a lot less mistakes um I also think it would go way better if we get support from Apple and Google on the operating systems it is much easier for me I mean I've got three kids they've got three iPads each one have has one it's much easier for me to tell the iPad that this kid is born in 2016 this kid is born in 2017 this kid is born in 2020 when I

first said it up then for every app to try and figure out how to do Age collection age verification and age prediction on its own and right now I can ask my phone as an app developer where is this person in the world right now to 10 feet can I to listen to their microphone to turn their camera on but I can't ask for permission for to know what their birthday is and that's crazy and so if we could do that and if you could do not just Age collection but also parental control at the

operating system or the App Store level you would have way less mistakes I don't know if that's ever going to happen so we have to do everything we can to predict age well to build good parental controls to balance these different equities that are intention and we will and I think we do really well but not as well as we can we're going to have to get better and better and better uh but right now I'm worried that the industry as a whole is not headed in a direction where you're not going to have too

much slipped through the cracks yeah I I want to talk to you about the future I feel like you you know you obviously uh H have been on the ground here and involved with with um Facebook and and Instagram I think you'd have a good perspective on where things go in the future two questions for you about the future the first has to do with um Tik Tok if in a year from now Tik Tok is is gone from the US what does that mean for Instagram I mean I can't talk too much about this

one in general I worry about a world where more and more platforms are banned in more and more countries and countries and governments use that stick as a way to push their own agendas the vast majority of our business is outside of the US uh so it would I think drive more attention not only to Instagram but to YouTube and other platforms but it is a step in a more and more fragmented internet which I think is probably bad um uh overall now to be clear it could maybe get sold and you know there's other

paths here I don't want to guess about what's going to happen and so without speaking to the specific band and Tik Tok here in the US I do worry about a more and more fragmented internet I'm curious what you think and I don't even know how much you can say but like what is next for social media in General on this wave because uh there there's been all of these markers right of like all right we have Vine we have really short video uh we have long form video we have stories we have all these

different fine was just too a little too early way too early we have all these different markers of like oh here's a new instrument we can use even text right with Twitter and threads it's like here's a new instrument where we can communicate yeah what are we on the precipice of I mean there's going to be a bunch of different things and I don't pretend to have a crystal ball I do think that I mean the the current Paradigm shifts I think will continue for the foreseeable future so for at least five more years right

so more and more sharing is going to shift from feed based formats to messaging based formats um you know You' mentioned Snapchat before Snapchat is not a stories product yes they have stories the vast majority of sharing at Snapchat is in messages there are way more photos and messages shared on Instagram in a given day than posted to stories and there are way more photos and videos posted to stories and posted to feed yet people think of us as a feed app so you're going to see that continue to shift um and I think that's

interesting for a number of different reasons I do think video has not um fully saturated yet I think you're going to see mobile video continue to grow probably primarily driven by short fir video but what you're really seeing I think is mobile video Eating into TV's market share um so we talk a lot about Snapchat Instagram Tik Tok but the truth is like we all exist in a much broader ecosystem in the US the average family watches 5 hours of TV in Western Europe it's three and India I think it's three or four so I

think you're going to see video continue to grow so that's kind of a a Tailwind for digital creators like yourself I do think you're going to see um I don't know how or I don't know exactly what it'll look like but if you think about every five years ago there seems to be some big shift in how people share that manifests as some combination of a new format or a new channel so um you know moving to moving away from SMS or you know reals and Tik Tok or before that stories which was pioneered by

snap I think originally invented by caca um I think we'll probably see one of those in the next five years it's probably facilitated by all of this generative AI I think that a lot of the stuff that we're looking at now in that space will be a little bit cringeworthy in five years because it's so new but that's kind of what happens and what's really exciting about our new technology is people are just trying things out and I think we'll also see more and more this is more further out I don't know how the social

networks are going to evolve in a world where you've got more and more sort of ambient not ambient awareness but more and more time is going to shift to this format right like right now we've got the ray B metas which obviously you know about which by the way I've been doing really well um and I think the sleeper feature on those they're showing up like socially too like for me as I go out and like people bring them out and I'm like oh that's cool like you're enjoying this experience and sending me videos and

photos after the sneaky feature about this I think is the speakers in the mic yeah I do think people are sleeping on this I wore them for a full day uh the first time I tried them yeah and by the end of the day my honest thought uh because I was skeptical I was like I was around for Google Glass oh yeah Snapchat spectacles like all the above but uh after wearing these for a day my first thought was these could potentially replace my iPhone down the line a long time from in a long time

but but it was the first glimpse of like oh this product I got really used to just communicating out loud which felt a little funny because I was just walking around talking yeah um but the video quality is incredible the um audio quality is incredible and the perspective is very unique yeah so like I think these are yeah the mic is also sneaky good because it's in the nose Bridge so it's closer to your mouth so it ends up being better with maybe less expensive Hardware than like a fancy ear Ear Pod because it's physically

closer to your mouth so I mean I liked I mean I don't think Marquez was the first one to talk about it this way but I kind of liked his framing when he did that video about how all of these virtual reality headsets are trying to come at the future from this One Direction with this you know large piece of hardware on your face but it does everything and then these are trying to come at it from the other end which is like all right they don't there's no screen right so we can't show you

an image you can't see a notification but you know there's going to be more Reliance on voice there's going to be obviously llms are really making more audio and Voice driven interfaces much more practical and much more human um coming at it from the other side and so where is it going to meet in the middle but it's like a lot of physics challenges right you know batteries are hard to make small you know so like how do you have a screen that you can see through these are like wild interesting challenges taking swings in

this sector obviously we saw it with Humane yeah like oh yeah yeah just like taking swings of like maybe this is how a wearable works because like the concept of a screen like this plus something like that may be kind of interesting yeah um so that I could then engage with a screen but who knows where this goes in the next couple years but I do find this to be one of the most compelling pieces of Technology I've engaged with the thing that's going to be really interesting to me is I think in 3 to

seven years you're going to see things that are for lack of a better analogy halfway between that and like a quest or a Vision Pro sure they're not going to be as slick and you're not going to be as comfortable wearing them but they're going to do more of the things and that'll be interesting because the early adopters will kind of like dictate that period but then in like another 3 to 5 years when you can get to something that feels As Natural to wear as that and even that's still too heavy um that does

more of what a quest does then things I get get really interesting and what is Instagram in that moment right because if our core jobs are to connect people around creativity so it's to connect with friends and connect with your interests but we come from a visual Heritage and the primary interface is actually voice what is it what do we how do we evolve um if we talked a lot about cultural relevancy of Instagram if Instagram in 5 years loses its relevance what do you think went wrong we probably just moved too slow when people

ask me what my biggest concerns are they almost always lad up to this idea of the world evolving faster than we can keep up so you know as you hire more and more people there's more overhead you move more slowly as there's more and more scrutiny there's more and more sort of risk mitigation functions and processes you move more slowly as you get more heavily regulated you move more slowly um as you become if you become short if you become too short-term focus on short-term Revenue you move more slowly you hold on to the past

so it's almost always the reason why I'm worried about the thing is I think the world is going to change faster and faster we've seen that for all of of human history the particularly in technology the rate of innovation has just been increasing and I think the most likely thing for any platform of our scale is that eventually we will just move slower than the world and the world will move away and we'll be left in the dust uh and so what that looks like is harder to predict but I think if it happens I

put a lot of money on that's why it happens well Adam I know we have to get you out of here I know I got to do my H review you got to go yeah you got to get to a meeting um thanks so much for hanging out such a blast it was really fun I'm I'm I like I like had seen some of your content before but I went real deep over the last two days and I'm now like a genuine fan oh great so you have now you've got one more fan you can

talk to your advertisers about amazing well thank you for coming on the show thanks for having me and if you guys have more questions just DM Adam I guess you might as I geter on Monday I go into those DMs I go in the request folder and I try to answer a couple every I do like that you do amas every Friday every Friday I have I don't know when I'm going to do it today actually if you do have a question you can ask me a question for sure for sure actually now that I

follow you on Instagram if you ask a question it'll bubble up to the top of my AMA so you're more likely to get answer well we'll ask a question now although we did just ask a lot yeah we just asked do I need to pay for metav verified realizing we didn't touch that but that's all right I'll ask you an AMA for the next time for the next time all right all right thanks guys thanks Adam [Music]