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When you're running a small business, sometimes there are no words. But if you're looking to protect your small business, then there are definitely words that can help. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. And just like that, a State Farm agent can be there to help you choose the coverage that fits your needs. Whether your small business is growing or brand new, your State Farm agent is there to help. On the phone or in person. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
Two hours ago, Facebook announced it is buying, this is unbelievable, the photo sharing company Instagram. Oh my God, that is unbelievable. What is Instagram? This is Jon Stewart on The Daily Show in April 2012. Apparently, he was not one of the 30 million people who already knew what Instagram was and were using it to take photos, slap on artsy filters, and share them with friends. Oh.
That's really lame. A billion dollars of money for a thing that kind of ruins your pictures? Apparently Jon Stewart was behind on the hot new thing: mobile apps. So was Zuckerberg. You'll remember from our last episode. Facebook was playing major catch-up on the shift from desktop computers to smartphones. And Instagram was one of Zuckerberg's ideas of how to catch up quickly.
He decided to make a huge bet to pay what seemed like an absurd amount of money for the mobile app, which had no revenue and 13 employees. It may have seemed silly then, but this bet ended up being one of the best tech acquisitions of all time. And looking back, it secured Facebook's dominance in social media in a way that it likely wouldn't have achieved on its own. This is Land of the Giants.
By the time Zuckerberg bought Instagram, the young startup already had a distinct set of values, a culture that prized the appearance of authenticity and aesthetic simplicity above anything else. It's a formula that rocketed Instagram to cultural relevance, and Facebook promised to leave those values intact.
But over time, that pledge to keep Instagram at arm's length was tested. This is the story of how Facebook took over Instagram and scaled it from a startup into the social media juggernaut it is today. It's also the story of why Instagram is now a completely different app than when it first started and how it's evolving to take on its latest threat, the rise of TikTok.
Back in 2010, when Instagram started, people were already used to documenting their lives on social media. Going out was fun, but making sure everyone knew that you had gone out was way better. Facebook had photos, but the culture around Facebook photos was you would come home from a night out and you would upload an entire album of digital camera photos. Whereas with Instagram, you were posting one good photo.
Sarah Fryer is the author of No Filter, The Inside Story of Instagram. She's covered the company for Bloomberg for years. And she points out this key distinction between Instagram and other social media platforms. Curation.
Facebook was about photo albums, but with Instagram, you were offering just a tantalizing glimpse into your life straight from the camera in your pocket. The result was like a magazine spread. Pretty highlights of you and your friends' lives perfectly edited and framed into neat squares. If your Instagram feed was the magazine, Kevin Systrom was editor-in-chief.
Systrom, the co-founder of Instagram, had this curated GQ highbrow idea of life, where he was constantly seeking out new experiences. He got really into art. He got really into bourbon, scotch. He had interests, music. He liked to DJ.
While Systrom knew how to code, creating an iPhone app that worked well and looked good was a bit beyond his capabilities. So when he started looking around for a co-founder to create a new social networking app, he thought of Mike Krieger. Krieger fit the classic Silicon Valley persona more than Systrom. He went to Stanford to study symbolic systems, a mix of artificial intelligence, computer science, and philosophy. Very Stanford. ♪
The partnership worked. A year after Instagram launched Apple named it App of the Year, it was sweeping up users, more than 15 million of them.
But, you know, professionally, obviously, we have a lot of growing to do. I think while $15 million is great, $150 million is better, and $500 million is even better. So, you know, we're at the beginning stages of our company. That's Kevin Systrom talking to Forbes in 2011. All those users meant Instagram needed to scale fast and with help. The company had some good options.
Twitter had been in talks to acquire it at one point. But in April 2012, there was one social media incumbent in the room, a much more powerful one, that made Instagram an offer it couldn't refuse. The biggest reason why they wanted to join Facebook is because Zuckerberg promised them that they could remain independent. Instagram agreed to the sale, but then the two companies needed to get used to each other. The Instagram employees worked at this little company
office at Facebook and Facebook employees would walk by and kind of look and just kind of look at them like they were in a zoo. Like these are these people who have their hipster coffee and their fancy cameras and their art.
It wasn't just that Instagram and Facebook had different cultures. They had different tech stacks, too. It wasn't exactly plug-and-play. It was more like I brought my American plug to the European sockets and there wasn't a few adapters required, you know, but we still had power. Mike Schreffer was head of engineering at Facebook back then. He remembers meeting with his new Instagram colleagues early on. We sort of gave them the a la carte menu, like,
Here's all the stuff we've got. What are your most urgent needs? And it was very important to me that we not require them to adopt anything because I had been through acquisitions the other way where you had to like adopt whatever the standard and it was like strictly worse than what you were using. So I was like, don't take anything that makes your life worse. Only use the stuff that makes your life better.
Stuff and also employees. Instagram had only 13 people handling 30 million users. They were drowning. So Facebook started funneling personnel over to Instagram, which meant the two cultures could sometimes clash. Facebook's culture was famously move fast, break things.
Instagram's culture was more like, don't ruin it. Keep this precious thing that we've created simple. If you need to add something to our product, we really have to think about it. Fryer writes about an example in her book. Some Facebook engineers wondered why Instagram didn't add a feature that had the potential to unlock crazy growth. On Instagram, there is no resharing. So everything that you post on your own profile is something that you have created.
Why not add a regram button for the grid? Unlock the ability for a post to go viral. Because this was anathema to Instagram at the time.
The founders wanted users connecting directly to the people that inspired them. They wanted to create communities around things like photography or travel or rock climbing. Instagram already had hashtags anyway. That was how it encouraged discovery. If you remember back then, a long list of hashtags underneath a post was essentially like SEO hacking. Zuckerberg was keeping his promise. No interference. Even as resources flowed in, Facebook didn't start changing things at Instagram.
Systrom and Krieger had the final say. In 2012, Charles Porch was running entertainment partnerships for Facebook. But soon after Instagram joined, he knew he wanted to transfer over. I cornered Kevin Systrom in a micro kitchen, pitched him on some of my wacky ideas, took it on as a part-time role, and it grew from there. Porch is now VP of global partnerships at Instagram. And one of those ideas? Get more celebrities on the platform.
Some famous people were already there. It was people like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez. And they were at the time having this epic romance, which was documented on Instagram. There were beach selfies and pics where they were kissing each other and just ecstatically in love. Far more intimate than any paparazzi pic. Instagram was a new, powerful way to reach fans for a celebrity like Bieber. Twitter wasn't visual, and posting to YouTube was far more complicated. Sure.
There could have been some PR strategizing behind those selfies, but this way of communicating felt unrehearsed. His fans, mostly young people, loved it. I thought, if we can get the right people using Instagram themselves in terms of
letting fans know that it's actually them that we would really have something. It was a strategy for growth, bringing new users in and keeping them active. And it was a strategy to center Instagram as a place where culture was being created.
One of the places we started really early on was fashion and designers. And Kevin was always passionate about craft. And a lot of these people, that's really what they were. They were craftspeople. Porch began to host parties and set up dinners so Systrom could charm top magazine editors and designers, where he'd make the case that Instagram was about beauty and aspiration, just like the fashion world.
Some people in that world were an easy sell. Top models like Arizona Muse and Fei Fei Sun were beginning to cultivate followings on the app. By 2014, Porch and Systrom's work in the fashion world would pay off in a big way. In 2014,
I see the September issue of Vogue come out. And as you know, that's the biggest issue of the year. It's a big deal. And on the cover, there's a group of supermodels. And the headline is Instagirls. We've hit on something here and we're breaking through. And that was a huge shift. And it was super exciting. Karlie Kloss, Joan Smalls, and Cara Delevingne were a new kind of supermodel.
They weren't just mysterious ciphers for us to project our luxury longings onto. They were sharing Halloween selfies and lunch photos on Instagram, and their popularity on the app could book them runway and editorial jobs. Instagram had become influential. And this influence was lucrative for anyone who wielded it. Sarah Fryer. The movement happened in both directions. Regular people became celebrities and celebrities became Instagram influencers.
Instagram was the first platform to let anyone with a smartphone camera become an internet celebrity. And with celebrity status came money. Instagram's newly minted influencers were especially attractive to brands and advertisers. These influencers were cultivating aspiration but holding onto a veneer of authenticity. They also had direct relationships with their followers.
Enter the age of product placement and sponsored posts. Instagram itself was figuring out how to bring in money too. Systrom wanted to prove that Facebook hadn't been crazy to put down a billion dollars. In 2013, he introduced ads for the first time. Ashley Yuki is one of those employees that made the jump from Facebook to Instagram early on. She was working on the business side. And Yuki says that at first, the ads process was as old school as it gets.
Kevin was actually hand approving creatives from every single advertiser. And obviously it wouldn't scale. But in the early days, that was a really great way to sort of set the tone for what kind of advertising creative and content will do well in this space because we are so visual forward, because we are so inspiration based. Yuki is now co-head of product at Instagram. By early 2015, Zuckerberg was ready for Instagram's ads business to scale up.
According to Fryer's book, he told Systrom that he wanted to see a billion dollars in ad revenue in the next fiscal year. But good news, Facebook could help. I mean, they already had this amazing ads platform that I could plug into. I didn't have to build that from the ground up. Unlike Systrom laying out ads on his desk, Facebook's ad platform was automated.
It used Facebook's enormous trove of user data to hyper-target audiences for advertisers. This is the way it still works. Ad buyers pick what kinds of demographics they want to reach, and Facebook does the work of showing those users the right ads. For Instagram, hooking into that system opened it up to Facebook's vast base of advertisers. A big deal.
So behind the scenes, Instagram the company was evolving. But in 2015, the app itself looked nearly identical to the app that launched five years earlier. This was by design. Simplicity was king with Instagram. And if you wanted to add a feature, you better have an extremely compelling reason to do so. It sounds so small now, but at the time, it was a sacred cow of the company. More like a sacred shape.
The square was our calling card. It was indelibly linked to our brand. The logo itself was a square. Your whole profile grid is all squares. The problem was that some of Instagram's user base didn't feel the same way. Yuki noticed that more and more users were posting photos with borders that allowed them to appear horizontal or vertical inside the square, a practice called letterboxing. So some people at the company wondered, why not make a feature where users wouldn't have to jury-rig the photo shape they wanted?
And I remember it was, I would say at least half, if not more, of the company internally, the sentiment was like, why would we make a change like this when this is our heritage and this is what we're known for? This is what makes Instagram, Instagram, the square. ♪
The bar to add or subtract anything at Instagram was extremely high. So Yuki, in a very Facebook approach to the problem, asked Krieger to check it out, to get some real numbers on how many people were looking outside the box. So that night, Mikey, on the shuttle going home, just like hand-pulled a sample and categorized like how many of them are letterboxed. 20%.
20% roughly. So if one in five things that people are posting feel like they're just not natively supported by the platform in a way that they need to be to do the job of connecting with everything you want to, then you're not evolving with what people want. Instagram could remain precious and prize its beloved square above all else, or it could conform to how people wanted to use it. I think this was the first time we were confronted with
what was really, like I said, a sacred cow of the company and saying, you know, are we ready to evolve our product forward in a way that might make us a little bit uncomfortable, but feels like where the world is going and how people want to share. And obviously we ultimately did it and it went really well.
The next major change was a lot more complicated, but the stakes were much higher, too. Instagram had always been about presenting an idealized version of your life to the world. But when supermodels were now the gold standard for what was cool on Instagram, what did that mean for everyone else? By 2015, the pressure to post that perfect gram was starting to feel crushing. People were posting less.
Vishal Shah was watching this from the inside. He's VP of Metaverse at Meta now, but he came into the company via Instagram in 2015. As more professional content creators came to the platform, more celebrities came to the platform, then the sort of bar of what good was kept rising. For us, if the pressure to post was so high and people stopped posting, then the whole platform kind of becomes less relevant. Not only less relevant, less posting meant less engagement with the feed and ads.
This pressure was actually a threat to business. And the pressure was particularly acute among teens. Here's Sarah Fryer. Every time they posted, every comment that they got, every reply and like was like a measuring stick about whether they were cool or not. Take selfies. The selfie game could be cutthroat. The rules for navigating etiquette were overwhelming.
The pressure was tremendous. Was the angle just right? The lighting? Were you using the right hashtags? And there was intense anxiety over likes and comments. If your friend didn't comment to say you looked amazing, were you even friends? Like all that stuff was stuff making teens go crazy because they're trying to figure out who they are. And here is Instagram telling them that they have a lot of work to do.
There was another app that wasn't sending that message. Snapchat. Snapchat had a feature called Stories, where you could post random photos and they'd disappear after 24 hours. There were no public comments or likes to obsess over. Private messages disappeared after they were viewed. The pressure wasn't so intense, and teens loved it.
And their opinions mattered. Teens are a key demographic to any social app. They represent lifelong users, which means lifelong revenue streams. And Facebook's own research has shown that teens get older people to use a service. If teens were jumping to another app, that was a huge problem for Instagram. Some teams inside Instagram suggested new features that would help take the edge off the pressure. But change is hard.
Kevin Systrom was asked about this time at South by Southwest in 2019. I mean, as a founder, imagine you go from living in a tiny little apartment with no savings, no nothing, no company, to like the opposite of that. You're going to convince yourself that what got you to this point will get you to the next point. And all you have to do is keep following that.
But eventually, the Snapchat threat became too big to ignore. Instagram would copy stories and not even bother to call it something else. Which for Shalshaw is fine owning. We were super open in giving credit to Snap for really popularizing that format. But it works. It's ephemeral. It is kind of narrative oriented because it's chronological. It's a mixture of photos and videos. It's full screen. And it just, it's a more natural, low pressure format for the platform.
Instagram launched Stories in August 2016. It was a major departure from the original vibe of the app. But for many people, Stories meant that sharing their lives could be fun again. Since posts wouldn't stay visible forever on your Instagram profile, there was less pressure.
There's something very human about how Instagram developed. If you take any person in the audience here, including me, and you're one-on-one in a room, you express yourself with someone else. If you know them fairly well, you'll say whatever. It's relaxed, right? This is Systrom again at South by Southwest in 2019. But the second you start getting more people in that room, you start to worry about, am I presenting myself correctly? And I think stories was a big way of allowing people to share more casually.
Looking back, Systrom is saying that Stories wasn't a departure from Instagram's core philosophy. It was a return to it. A way to authentically share your life visually. And Instagram Stories was a major success competitively, too. It amassed more daily users than the entirety of Snapchat in just eight months. About two years later, Instagram would hit one billion users. It looked unstoppable. Facebook had the powerful ability to neutralize a rival.
in buying a competitor like Instagram and copying other competitors like Snap. This would be one of the issues later raised by regulators in antitrust allegations. But it wouldn't take long for another threat to arise. After the break, Instagram faces a new competitor that's going to force it to change its identity more than ever before.
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On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.
When Kevin Systrom sat down at a Wired event with reporter Lauren Good in late 2018, he was no longer speaking on behalf of the company he'd founded. Were there tensions when you left? Think about when you leave anything, there are obviously reasons for leaving, right? No one ever leaves a job because everything's awesome. Just weeks before, he was still CEO of Instagram.
Things, in fact, were not awesome, even though on the surface they seemed to be going really well. This quarter, we also reached a milestone with now more than a billion actives on Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg on an earnings call in July 2018. What he said next was a clue for how he was feeling about Instagram at the time.
We believe Instagram has been able to use Facebook's infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it would have on its own. Yeah, Instagram had scored a billion users. But Zuckerberg wanted to make clear it happened because of Facebook's resources. Congrats, Instagram. But really, you're welcome.
So here's what went down and why growth at Instagram, seemingly a good thing, led the relationship between Systrom and Zuckerberg to sour. It's ironic, given the fact that growth is also a major reason the companies came together in the first place. Which is how Kevin Systrom put it on the Lex Friedman podcast last year. I mean, we're talking a lot about money, but the real question was, I'm not sure you'll believe me when I say this, but could we strap our little company onto the side of a rocket ship?
and like get out to a lot of people really, really quickly. By 2018, the Facebook rocket ship had more than done its job. One example, links on Facebook encouraged people to make Instagram accounts. It was essentially millions of dollars in free marketing. Growth took off at Instagram.
But then, Facebook executives began to suspect that Instagram was sucking engagement away from the Blue app, Zuckerberg's prized property. If enough people migrated over, it could meet an irreversible decline for Facebook's user growth. That little app that Zuckerberg bought for $1 billion, it was now challenging Facebook's own dominance.
— To add to that tension between the two apps was this news, delivered on that second quarter earnings call in 2018. — Our total revenue growth rates will continue to decelerate in the second half of 2018. — That's David Wehner, the chief financial officer of Facebook.
The information he delivered in this very dry corporate speak, it was devastating. That slowdown in revenue growth led Facebook to lose the most stock value in a single day of any company in U.S. history at the time: $120 billion. Facebook felt like Instagram should help, so it demanded a huge increase in ads and also a new feature: links on Instagram that sent traffic to Facebook.
While I was reporting on this saga at the time, I heard over and over that this was framed internally as giving back to the family. Yes, that sounds like mafia speak. It meant that Instagram had been sucking away the resources of Facebook's family of apps and now needed to pay back its debts. Another way Facebook had gotten more involved at Instagram, the head of the news feed, Adam Masseri, had moved over to Instagram to run product. It was clear that Systrom's days of running Instagram independently were over.
And the straw that broke the camel's back. Zuckerberg made the call to turn off the growth spigot, the features that funneled Facebook users over to Instagram.
Systrom wrote a memo to his team saying he disagreed with the decision and went on paternity leave. In September 2018, when he got back from leave, Systrom and Mike Krieger abruptly announced they were stepping down, surprising the public and their own employees. Less than a month after that, Systrom was on that wired stage with reporter Lauren Good. It didn't feel done by any stretch of the imagination, but it felt like it was in orbit.
And that if we let go and let others take it, it would continue to do really well. And I think the decision for me was like, are we in the right orbit? And it felt like we were. And that's that. But a lot has changed since the founders left. Instagram isn't anywhere near as simple as it once was. If you want to post on Instagram today,
You could post to your stories. You could post to your reels. Maybe you want to add your stories to your highlights. What are highlights again? Maybe you want to post on your main feed. Oh, also on your stories. It doesn't have to be a video. It could be text. There are a lot of color options. As journalist Sarah Fryer points out, Instagram in 2022 is a lot. This is Instagram in the age of meta. Instead of having to pay back the family, Instagram is now sitting at the head of the table.
With Facebook's days of hyper growth in the rearview mirror, Instagram's growth and revenue is key to the future of meta. But all those features, Instagram exec Ashley Yuki thinks about this a lot.
I mean, it's something that keeps me up every night. I would like Instagram to be more simple than it is today. Simplicity was part of Instagram's initial magic. It did something really well, and that hooked people. But some of the most coveted users of all have been fueling the growth of another app, just as Meta needs them the most. Oh!
Okay, I'm going to be doing the trend where you put balsamic vinegar in soda and see if it tastes like natural Coke. Okay, I'm bored in the house and I'm in the house bored. Bored in the house. Okay, he's a 10, but he listens to alpha male podcasts. I'm immediately a 2.
That is the sound of Instagram's newest existential threat, TikTok. You'd have to be living under a rock not to see how the app has really blown up over the past couple of years. Unlike on Instagram, on TikTok, you only see one full-screen, quick-looping video, followed by another and another. You don't have to like, follow, or do anything on TikTok besides swipe up. Like Instagram in its early years, TikTok has created a whole new economy of creators making a lot of money on its platform.
Celebrities are flocking to it, too. This is kind of funny. There's a tour bus here. Hey, you guys know where I can find the rock? And TikTok is the favorite social media app among teens. That's according to a prominent industry survey from the investment bank Piper Sandler. A respectable 22% of teens said Instagram was their favorite app. But that number has been steadily declining. And it's more than 10 percentage points behind TikTok.
Teens have already largely fled Facebook. It's been a sore spot at the company for years. There's also been a lot of criticism lately that Instagram might be harmful for some teens, especially those who struggle with body issues or mental health, though the research isn't conclusive yet. It all means there's extra pressure to keep the demographic engaged on Instagram. Reels is already 20% of our time spent. It was one of our biggest drivers of engagement last year. Ashley Yuki again.
Reels is Meta's answer to TikTok. The short-form video feature was launched on Instagram in 2020. And yes, it's basically a copy-paste. In fact, if you open Reels when it launched, you'd likely see a bunch of old and repurposed TikToks. Reels is a major priority for Meta. They're everywhere when you open Instagram, which may account for all that engagement. Yuki says change is sometimes necessary. How do we make sure we're evolving Instagram? The same way we evolved it, you know, in 2016 with Stories, we're
to this new era of how people want to communicate while still capturing that intersection of being this unique space where you're catching up with your friends, but you're also discovering your interests. Stories fixed a problem for users and neutralized a major competitive threat. Reels is an attempt to replicate that playbook, but it's also a major departure from the way Instagram has worked in the past.
It shifts Instagram from a model that encourages connections based on friends to one based on discovery, from curating who you follow to bringing you entertainment from people outside of your follower list. Now, the people who make that content, Instagram's creators, are having to navigate this shift in priorities. So I first got on Instagram about six years ago, and at the time I was throwing these
fairy tale gatherings for strangers. Miss Wondersmith is a classic Instagram creator in the mold of how Systrom and Krieger thought of them. She's 30 years old, lives in Idaho, and does something unique and very visual. I would create these elaborate gatherings where I would make all of the ceramics for eating out of. I would forage all the ingredients. I would cook all of the food and try to make it as creative and weird and interesting as possible.
All of this, of course, looks great on Instagram. A cake that appears as if it's covered in moss, teacups, but the handles are snails. She's got over 50,000 followers. Doesn't mean she's not into TikTok as well. I found that TikTok had a very different feeling than Instagram for me. Instagram felt a little bit more curated, whereas TikTok is much more...
casual. And you would see that, like, even the big creators on TikTok would just be filming in their bedroom, and their bedroom might be messy, and nobody really cared. Miss Wondersmith likes that chill vibe. And as a user, she was shocked at how quickly the algorithm started serving up relevant content, like scary relevant. In fact, it... Joining TikTok helped me realize that I'm gay, which was...
not what I expected at all when I joined it. Within like two days of joining TikTok, my For You page was just filled with lesbians. And at first I thought it was funny. I was like, what? TikTok thinks I'm gay. What a crazy thing. But it wasn't so crazy. Then the videos of other women realizing that they were gay later in life as well started popping up and I started really resonating with them.
A TikTok of her making an engagement ring for her fiancé went viral on the platform. But for most of her content, Instagram still felt like home. On TikTok, her profile was at the mercy of the algorithm. As a creator, she says she doesn't feel the same consistent connection with her community there. But the vibe on Instagram has been different lately because of Reels. The way to, like,
Keep up with the algorithm is to post as many reels as you can as often as you can and hope that as many as possible go viral. And that's really the only way to reach a new audience on Instagram anymore is through reels, which is basically...
TikTok. This focus on Reels, it puts a lot of weight on Instagram's algorithm to work well. Instagram and Facebook were very good at showing you exactly what they already knew you wanted to see. Now they're going to be about showing you stuff you didn't know you wanted to see. Well, they're not always going to get it right.
As Sarah Fryer explains, Reels flips Instagram from an active to a passive experience. Sit back and let the algorithm feed you. The way Kevin Systrom used Instagram to better understand architecture or how to cook great steak, you can still do that, but I think the intentionality, like the reason we go to these platforms is more about sit back, relax, and be entertained from now on. I think when there are other companies...
that just seem exciting. And now all of a sudden the product shifts in some fundamental way to go try to compete with that other thing. That's when I think consumers get confused. That was Kevin Systrom on the Lex Friedman podcast last year. Systrom never says reels explicitly in this interview, but we know a subtweet when we see one. So I think one of the challenges Facebook has had throughout its life is that it has never fully, I think, appreciated the job to be done of the main product.
And what it's done is said, ooh, there's a shiny object over there. That startup's getting some traction. Let's go copy that thing. And then they're confused why it doesn't work. Like, why doesn't it work? It's because the people who show up for this don't want that. It's different. So why do users show up then? Instagram was about sharing your life with others visually, period. Right? Why? Because you feel connected with them.
You get to show off. You get to feel good and cared about, right, with likes. And it turns out that that will, I think, forever define Instagram. Maybe not.
In June 2021, the current head of Instagram, Adam Masseri, posted a video to his Instagram account laying out the app's new priorities. Today I actually want to talk a bit more about video. And I want to start by saying we're no longer a photo sharing app or a square photo sharing app. The number one reason people say that they use Instagram in research is to be entertained.
Mosseri was saying plainly, incredibly, that the identity of Instagram was starting to shift. Instagram kicked off the era of visual social media by doing it better than anyone else. Its simplicity and focus created a whole new class of creators. It managed to strike a tough balance between keeping the app's original identity while also moving forward and staying relevant.
Sarah Fryer says you can actually still see that relevance out in the real world. I think Instagram is still the only app that you can see as you walk around. Like, as you go into a place that's just been renovated, a home that's been redesigned, you know, a dish that's been prepared for you at a restaurant, you can tell they did this because of Instagram.
It's still this visual cultural trendsetter. But the way Meta is changing Instagram now, it's from an established playbook. Add a new feature, see what sticks. But over a year after the launch of Reels, Instagram hasn't been able to overtake TikTok the way Stories did to Snap. Instagram is still one of the most culturally relevant apps in the world. Whether it continues to be will depend on how users react to its shifting identity. Coming up on Land of the Giants...
We'll be back in two weeks with the second half of our series, Facebook's Reckoning Years, featuring interviews from Zuckerberg's inner circle and his most prominent critics. After a string of scandals focuses intense scrutiny on Facebook's practices, Zuckerberg is pushed to take responsibility for the impact of his platform. In our fourth episode, we'll start the story of Facebook's journey to that responsibility with the rules Facebook wrote around one particular politician.
Special thanks this week to Liz Pearl, Justina Sharp, and Sarah Pudo. Land of the Giants, the Facebook meta disruption, is a production of Recode, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane is our senior producer. Aluakemi Aladisuyi is our producer. Production support for this episode from Cynthia Betubisa.
Joe Lee Myers is our editor. Richard Seema is our fact checker. Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Samantha Oltman is Recode's editor-in-chief. Jake Kasternakis is deputy editor of The Verge. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Karwa is our executive producer. I'm Alex Heath. And I'm Shireen Ghaffari. If you like this episode, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app. ♪