The head of Instagram has declared that it is “no longer a photo-sharing app”, as Facebook focuses on competing with TikTok and YouTube in short video clips.
“Video is driving an immense amount of growth online for all the major platforms right now and it’s one that I think we need to lean into more,” said Adam Mosseri, the Facebook executive in charge of Instagram. “We are no longer a photo sharing app.”
The shift away from the roots of what many analysts see as Facebook’s most vital engine of revenue growth risks alienating some of Instagram’s more than 1bn users, at a time when younger people are already increasing the amount of time they spend on other apps.
Instagram is also prioritising private messaging, ecommerce and influencers, instead of its original mainstay of friends posting photos in a feed, Mosseri said in a video posted online on Wednesday, as he pointed to “huge” competition from ByteDance-owned TikTok.
He said that in its internal research, Instagram’s users told the company the “number one” reason for using the app was to “be entertained”.
Social media companies are increasingly seeking to reposition themselves as destinations for entertainment or shopping, which can be easier to monetise and less problematic in content moderation than individuals’ personal posts.
Many of those personal photos, meanwhile, have migrated to messaging apps such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp, Apple’s iMessage and Telegram. At the same time, a new generation of social apps, such as Discord, Clubhouse, Poparazzi and BeReal, are attracting attention from venture capitalists, after many years where investment in Facebook alternatives had dropped off.
“Let’s be honest, there is some really serious competition right now: TikTok is huge, YouTube is even bigger and there [are] lots of other upstarts as well,” Mosseri said. “That means change” for Instagram over the coming months, he added.
Instagram has already added more prominent links to Reels, its TikTok rival for short videos, and Shop, a collection of posts from retailers and influencers. Soon, it plans to insert more of those kinds of posts into the main newsfeed, including from accounts that users do not already follow, Mosseri said.
Still, Instagram users generally appear to like the app as it is. The platform has a 4.7 rating out of 5 on Apple’s US and UK App Stores, based on more than 24m reviews.
In the UK as elsewhere, Facebook dominates consumers’ mobile habits, alongside Google. The two companies account for nine of the top 10 apps ranked by time spent and the portion of the adult population that uses them, with YouTube in first place and Instagram sixth, according to a recent survey by UK media regulator Ofcom.
Instagram also remains popular among teenagers, with nearly a quarter of 16 to 34-year-olds saying it was their main social media app.
However, Instagram’s reach on iPhones declined 18 percentage points in 2020 compared with 2019 and younger teenagers are increasingly attracted to TikTok over Instagram or its rival Snapchat, Ofcom found. Time spent on all of Facebook’s apps in the UK fell from 36 minutes in 2019 to 29 minutes a day in 2020, while ByteDance jumped to 20 minutes last year.
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