Instagram Long-Form Video, Reels & Adam Mosseri AMA

I'm going to pause it for a quick second because I want to talk about some of the things that he mentioned today.

First, he specifically highlighted how important this is for podcasters and people who do comedy specials, stand-up comedy.

As a podcaster, the pain that I feel around the process of creating clips, which takes me time, and then trying to get someone to go from the clip to the entire podcast episode, whether they listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or watch the interview on YouTube – That transition process is incredibly hard to do.

So if you're giving creators an opportunity to keep someone on the same platform the way YouTube does, if they see the clip, they can jump right to the whole episode.

I love that as a podcaster.

I also want to highlight that he said they are committed to this format over the long term.

Well, let's be honest, they were committed to IGTV for the long term way back when, and that was removed.

They were even committed to NFTs on Instagram, you may remember, and that was removed.

There are a lot of things that Instagram commits to that later are no longer part of the ecosystem.

So I certainly take that with a grain of salt.

In the next part of this clip, they talk about a connected experience across Instagram.

So for instance, maybe you're commuting and you're watching a short form video on the train and then you get home, turn on your television and you watch the entire interview or the entire standup special from the original clip you saw.

Here's that part.

And one of the things that we're hoping and already starting to see as we're testing these different products is that people might discover a long form video that they love by seeing a reel that's a clip of that video when they're watching reels on mobile.

And then when they go at the end of the day and open their TV and open Instagram on TV, we'll know that they watch that reel and we'll be able to say, hey, do you want to finish watching the episode of this, the podcast, the comedy special, whatever it is, so that we really are meeting you in whatever moment that you're in.

If you're trying to snack through short form videos, Reels is still going to be a core part of Instagram.

But when you want to go deeper with the creators you love and the content that they're creating, you should be able to do that on Instagram and you should be able to connect with your friends on Instagram around that content.

So that's a balance we're trying to get right.

It's going to take us a little time.

I'm going to stop the clip there, but I do want to take a second to address the monetization, which is not something that Instagram seems to be pursuing the way YouTube does for long form content.

So if I, as a podcaster, create clips, post them to Instagram, post the long form of that interview, someone goes from the clip to the long form interview, I do not make any revenue from that.

However, if I had pushed them to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, I would get ad revenue, or if I pushed them to YouTube and they subscribed, that would help to contribute to getting toward the goalposts that YouTube has set, which admittedly are incredibly high and hard for anyone to reach, but that's another topic for another time.