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Facebook saw no reason for Instagram photos to continue to display in Twitter posts.
“Instagram says it now has the right to sell your photos,” CNET blared. “Facebook forces Instagram users to allow it to sell their uploaded photos,” a Guardian headline warned.
Mostly, they had completely underestimated how much their users would mistrust—and even hate—Facebook. The angry tweets made it clear the Instagram community was looking for signs that the acquisition had ruined the app forever.
First, that Instagram indeed had a very different brand, one that its users cared about deeply. And second, that Facebook would have to be much more careful. Maybe they needed a liaison between the two companies, keeping a closer eye on the differences and figuring out how to deploy resources, translating Instagram’s needs into Facebookese.
And friends of Sandberg, or “FOSes,” as they were known internally, had a reputation for not shining as brightly once they were out of her dominion—at least according to the mostly male staff. White ignored the pushback. We’re about to piss away a billion dollars and a fabulous team because no one in the larger company really understands what we just bought, she thought.
The first step, then, would have to be education.
(Friends and business partners always gave Systrom bourbon as a gift, as a tribute to the early app’s name.)
The biggest was “community first,” meaning all their decisions should be centered around preserving a good feeling when using Instagram, not necessarily a more fast-growing business. Too many notifications would violate that principle. Then there was “simplicity matters,” meaning that before any new products could roll out, engineers had to think about whether they were solving a specific user problem, and whether making a change was even necessary, or might overcomplicate the app. It was the opposite of Facebook’s “move fast and break things,” where building for growth was valued over
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We need to constantly remind ourselves that we haven’t won and that we need to keep making bold moves and keep fighting or we risk peaking and fading away.”
Companies become a reflection of their founders. Systrom had created a place on the internet where the most interesting people who were the best at what they did could be followed by others, praised, and emulated.
The next generation of social apps was all about video. Users had long been asking Instagram to launch video, to the point that venture capitalists funded a handful of startups to beat them to the punch, including Viddy, Socialcam, and Klip.
Systrom and Krieger gave their engineers a six-week window to build and ship a way to post 15-second videos in the Instagram feed. There was no Facebook-style optimization baked into that number of seconds. It was “an artistic choice,” Systrom would say.
Android phones were notoriously more difficult to build for, since they came in different sizes by different manufacturers.
Afterward, Zuckerberg, Systrom, and all the others went back to the Instagram office and watched a ticker count up the number of videos posted. It was the first (and last) time anyone remembered Zuckerberg coming to the Instagram office.
When everything people posted was polished up for public consumption with likes and comments, where was the fun?
he came up with an app that was all about sending a photo that would vanish after a few seconds. The first version was called Picaboo. “It’s the fastest way to share photos that disappear,” Spiegel
“People are living with this massive burden of managing a digital version of themselves,” Spiegel told Forbes writer J. J. Colao. “It’s taken all of the fun out of communicating.” At first, Snapchat was described by the media as a sexting app. If you weren’t sending nudes, why else would you need your photos to disappear? But that characterization misunderstood how teens were using technology.
And they would often delete pictures if they didn’t get 11 likes.
That was the number of likes that would turn a list of names below an Instagram post into a number—a space-conserving design that had turned into a popularity tipping point for young people.
Snapchatting was like texting, or having an asynchronous video chat conversation. And it was fun. “The main reason that people use Snapchat is that the content is so much better,” Spiegel said to Forbes. “It’s funny to see your friend when they just woke up in the morning.”
Even worse for him, many of the people who downloaded Poke, who hadn’t known of Snapchat before, became aware through the process that there was another app doing the same thing better. Snapchat’s downloads climbed. Facebook had copied Snapchat’s functionality but they had failed to copy the app’s cool factor.
He was brainstorming with Stanford friend Nick Allen about allowing multiple photos, so people could create a flip-book for their days. On Instagram, you just posted the best picture or video from the party. But what about the photos and videos from getting ready, heading to the event, encountering friends there, and then being too hungover to go to class the
the product, called Stories, would be organized chronologically, with the oldest post appearing first, unlike on Twitter and Instagram, which always showed the most recent post first. Each addition to the Stories queue would expire after 24 hours. If users looked in time, they would see a list of the names of every single person who had checked out their update.
Systrom was still a CEO who didn’t make money. A few months after Zuckerberg had told Systrom to hold off on a business model, Instagram had proved itself more, with a user base well past 100 million. So in the middle of 2013, Facebook was finally willing to let the team experiment with ads.
Instagram modeled the look off Vogue magazine’s: high-end brand advertising showcasing products in a subtle manner, as just one element of the lives of beautiful, happy people.
Instagram ran its very first ad on November 1, 2013. Michael Kors, one of the premium brands the team had lined up, was allowed to post a photo on the @michaelkors account and then pay to distribute it to people who weren’t already following.
On that first day, representatives from Michael Kors called to complain that the hands on the watch actually read 5:10, not 5:15. They didn’t know how to edit their caption. The Instagram team confessed that so far, there was no way for any user to edit their captions, and no way for the company to override and do it for them.
In order to launch the advertising business, Instagram had to dodge an uncomfortable reality: advertising agencies hated Facebook.
The independence Zuckerberg had promised Instagram was holding for the product and engineering side, but the sales and operations side, run by Sheryl Sandberg, was starting to assert a deeper level of control.
Underwood refused, saying he valued his relationships and had promised a new kind of ad—not more of Facebook. Everson said the Facebook team would handle it from there. In fact, she insisted that future Instagram ads not be sold by a separate team at all. Underwood, realizing the Instagram job wasn’t the return to startup life he’d expected, didn’t last much longer in the role. Everson didn’t get exactly what she wanted either. When the Omnicom deal was announced in 2014, it was just for Instagram ads. Everson would later deny she ever asked for more.
The Onavo data showed that the app usage for Snapchat and Instagram was not competitive but was positively correlated: if someone used Instagram, they were likely to use Snapchat too.
“People who don’t take risks work for people who do,”
He built an app that was end-to-end encrypted, so the records of what people were saying to each other weren’t readable by anyone—not the police, and not even his company. He promised his users “no ads, no games, no gimmicks,” just a simple tool they could pay $1 a year to use. It would be a stretch to join Facebook, where surveillance of users powered the advertising engine.
There were some clues that Instagram was a promising place to apply the strategy. The stars who did have the app were managing their own accounts there, instead of hiring teams to do it for them. The network didn’t require a clunky fan page like Facebook or an insightful 140-character comment like Twitter.
The shift would birth an economy of influence, with all of the interconnected Instagram activity at its nexus, in territory uncharted by Facebook or Twitter.
As long as celebrities’ posts weren’t too promotional, they could give Instagram users a lens into previously inaccessible worlds, the same way Instagram had brought users behind the scenes with reindeer herders and latte artists. Celebrities managed communities just like Instagram did, and could help bring their fans to the app.
Systrom and Porch made their first trip to Los Angeles in 2013 with a new feature to woo celebrities: verification. Instagram was shamelessly copying a feature that Twitter offered, placing blue checkmark badges next to accounts to certify that the person behind them was indeed who they said they were. The verification badge had started as a measure to protect against impersonation but quickly evolved into a status symbol. If you were verified on Twitter, you were important enough that someone might want to impersonate you.
But Kutcher thought it was inevitable that in the digital age even movie stars would have to stop being so mysterious, because eventually casting decisions would be swayed by the ability to bring an audience to a movie, like he could with his Twitter followers. “It seemed clear in the entertainment industry that there would come a day when people would be valued as entertainers based on their ability to sell the product they were in,” Kutcher explained.
Instagram encouraged celebrities to use the app to document what they saw in their daily lives, taking power back from the paparazzi and controlling their own narratives. But stars posting on Instagram required a careful balance, different from what the paparazzi offered: if celebrities only logged on to post about their upcoming albums or movies, their followers would see their efforts as promotional. If they included that content with organic posts from their everyday lives, they would become relatable, and then their followers would be more likely to cheer for their commercial success.
Since the Kardashian-Jenner family had already shared so much of their lives on TV, they had no inhibitions about sharing them online.
Moore was the progenitor of the modern idea that someone could be famous for being famous and shamelessly build a business around it.
Since consumers are much more likely to be swayed to buy something if friends or family recommend it, as opposed to advertisements or product reviews, these ambiguous paid posts were effective.
Employees thought of the app as a democratizing force, allowing regular people to bypass the normal societal gatekeepers and simply show, based on their Instagram following, that they were worth investing in.
Public re-sharing was such a popular request that other entrepreneurs built apps like Regrann and Repost to attempt to fill the need, but these were no substitute for an in-app function. This made it harder to get noticed, but in some ways made it easier to build a personal brand. All your posts were yours. That was what the founders wanted.
The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.
With no human tastemakers in the way, the page was easier to game, the way Twitter and Facebook could be gamed. Those who were trying to build an audience learned to post at ideal times of day, like during lunchtime, or in the late afternoon or late evening, when people were most likely to be checking the app.
If something became popular on Instagram—whether a fitness routine, a home decor trend, or a flavor of cookie—did that make it more valuable in real life? Were endorsements from the Insta-famous worth seeking out or paying for? And if you had a popular brand in real life, should you try to get popular on Instagram too?
“Six or nine months later you finally saw that image in a magazine. With Instagram, the fact that we could hire our own photographers, our own team, and within minutes it could be online and we would have dialogue directly with people who were interested in our brand, was just incredible.”
He recalled that “there was a lot of cynicism in our industry about what we were doing with Instagram, and comments that luxury customers would never use this kind of platform, because it was too ubiquitous. Before that, fashion brands had been kind of sacred, veiled in secrecy.
He argued that the brand couldn’t avoid Burberry’s presence on Instagram, whether the fashion house was participating or not, since regular people were talking about the brand with a #burberry hashtag regardless, so they might as well be part of it.
