According to the Financial Times, Instagram’s president Adam Mosseri concedes that the app is “no longer a photo-sharing platform” as Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) tightens battle with TikTok and Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) YouTube in short video clips.
What Happened: Mosseri saw the growing importance of video in driving internet platforms and requested that the medium be given more attention.
Analysts are concerned that the change away from Facebook’s most important source of revenue growth may risk Instagram’s more than 1 billion users at a time when younger people are already spending more time on rival applications.
Following competition from ByteDance-owned TikTok, Mosseri talked about focusing private messaging, e-commerce, and influencers over its initial base of friends publishing photographs on a feed.
Companies like Facebook are increasingly attempting to rebrand themselves as entertainment or shopping destinations, which are easier to monetise and less difficult in terms of content management than individual posts.
In the meantime, many personal photographs have been transferred to messaging apps such as Facebook’s WhatsApp, Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iMessage, and Telegram. At the same time, a new generation of social apps such as Discord, Clubhouse, Poparazzi, and BeReal are drawing venture capitalists’ interest following a long period of investment in Facebook alternatives.
Instagram has already made Reels, a TikTok competitor for short videos, and Shop, a collection of posts from retailers and influencers, more prominent.
It intends to add more of these types of postings to the main newsfeed in the near future, even from accounts that users don’t already follow.
Based on more than 24 million reviews, Instagram received a 4.7 out of 5 rating on Apple’s U.S. and U.K. App Stores.
Why Does It Matter? With YouTube in first place and Instagram in sixth, Facebook and Google account for nine of the top ten applications based on time spent and the percentage of the adult population that uses them.
Instagram is the primary social networking platform for over a quarter of 16 to 34-year-olds. Instagram’s reach on iPhones, on the other hand, fell 18% year over year in 2020.
TikTok is becoming more popular among younger teenagers than Instagram or Snap Inc’s (NYSE: SNAP) Snapchat. In the United Kingdom, time spent using Facebook’s apps fell 19.4% Y/Y to 29 minutes per day in 2020, while ByteDance increased to 20 minutes last year.
On Thursday, FB shares closed 1.92 percent higher at $354.39, a gain of 1.92 percent.
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