No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

At Facebook, the news feed was full of competing features. Every product manager working on every aspect of the social network—events, groups, friend requests, comments—wanted their team’s tool to be granted an opportunity for a red dot, or a push notification, so that they would get a fair shake at meeting their growth goals and getting a good performance review.

Japanese users were complaining to him about little things, like using the word “ 写真” for “photos” instead of the more colloquial “フォト.”

community team at Instagram—the team focused on writing blog posts about interesting accounts and supporting user events—violated another central Facebook tenet, which was that Facebook only concentrated on things that scaled. They didn’t have outreach to their power users because a group, no matter its influence, didn’t matter strategically as much as the whole. What’s the return on investment for supporting one person, or several dozen people, when you could instead deploy your resources in a way that affects hundreds

quit before her one-year bonus time, sensing that her contributions were no longer valued. And she had other reasons too: the shuttle commute, the fact that she couldn’t bring her dog to the office, that employees were no longer hanging out like they used to. Mostly, she hated Facebook’s metrics-based employee review process. How could she show she was driving growth if she was just in charge of inspiring people?

Zuckerberg had created the largest network of humans ever. He chose to grow that community by tweaking the product constantly to pursue a greater and greater share of the time people spent on the internet, meanwhile looking at what his competitors were doing and coming up with strategies to undermine them. Systrom had never met anyone as tactical as Zuckerberg.

While welcoming Systrom into his company in 2012, Zuckerberg was emailing another young man, who was building a different app that appeared to be a breakout success. He also had elite schooling and a charmed upbringing, at least financially. His competitive philosophy? That everyone else was doing it wrong. Evan Spiegel’s Snapchat app started out as a Stanford party tool in 2011, as a rejection of the world Facebook and especially Instagram had created.

Teens, about to leave high school and enter the wider world, were quickly building networks that would serve as infrastructure for the rest of their lives. At that age, they were building new habits and amassing spending power without oversight from their parents, developing affinities for brands they’d have loyalty to for years.

Working manually on a small version of the product made more sense than spending precious engineering resources and navigating politics with Facebook’s ads sales team, for a system that might not ultimately work.

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. The image looked like it was straight out of a glossy lifestyle shoot in a fashion magazine: a gold watch with diamond trim, placed on a table surrounded by a gold-rimmed teacup and colorful French macarons.

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.

They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did. The data was easily accessible to Facebook employees, and was funneled into regular reports for executives and the growth team so that everyone could keep tabs on the competition.

“People who don’t take risks work for people who do,” he told her. She called the recruiter back and said she was interested.

Koum was notoriously untrusting, after growing up under surveillance by the USSR in Ukraine. 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

Between that and the Snapchat pursuit, there were suddenly no more doubts about whether Instagram was worth $1 billion to Facebook. Instead, Systrom was getting constant questions—from the media, from his peers in the industry, from everyone—about whether he’d sold too soon.

Randi Zuckerberg had been one of the earliest employees at Facebook. Ever since 2009, when President Barack Obama’s administration decided Twitter would be one of his primary ways to communicate with U.S. citizens, she’d wondered whether it was possible for Facebook to have a similar role in the world. Could her younger brother’s website be one that celebrities and musical artists and even presidents prioritized when they talked to their audiences?

Facebookers thought the strategy was frivolous nepotism—the CEO’s sister spending company money to go cavort with famous people. At a company with engineers at the top of the hierarchy, it wasn’t clear how these collaborations contributed directly to growth.

Every Instagram account would have the chance to be not just a window into someone’s lived experience—as the founders initially intended—but also their individual media operation. 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.

By the time he was at Facebook, Porch had developed a theory about what would attract public figures to social media sites. He would find a way to talk to celebrities directly and personally about their goals, rather than going through their record labels or managers. He knew how to make their posts online sound natural and personal. If celebrities lifted the curtain on some of their private thoughts and experiences, they would build a bond with their fan bases.

The public figures needed Instagram, and Instagram needed them—or at least, that was the pitch.

Hilton’s carefully controlled images and videos fueled her business. So when digital platforms like YouTube and iTunes eventually reached out for the opportunity to feature Hilton’s videos or music for nothing in return, Moore dismissed them. “We were used to getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per photo,” he explained. “Why would we do that for free?” But Jenner and Kardashian, who were still early in building their fame when Twitter launched, couldn’t make as much money off leaked photos. They realized that they could create an even bigger business in social media, by building their own version of a Hilton-inspired lifestyle brand, then selling ads based on the audience, as Moore was doing manually.

The Kardashian empire on Instagram was like Oprah’s Book Club in the late 1990s, with a supersize silicone injection.

Influencers like the Kardashians helped brands get around the pitfalls of online commerce. With the rise of Amazon and other sites, consumers had an abundance of options for whatever they wanted to buy.

There would be semifamous people pretending to be vulnerable so they could sell products that they pretended to love, which supported a lifestyle they pretended was authentic.

Facebook, would regularly suggest sharing tools to help increase the amount of posts on the app, only to be shot down by Systrom and Krieger. 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.

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?

Bailey met with Systrom and was inspired by his vision for Instagram as a source of behind-the-scenes moments. He started to notice accounts documenting fashion in the street, some of it Burberry, and was struck by how quickly new fashions appeared on the scene and were discussed by prominent accounts. The Instagram users wouldn’t wait for whatever print advertising was planned on Burberry’s calendar. Bailey realized that Burberry would need to start posting its own content to get ahead of the coming industry transformation.

This switch was risky. Bailey spent a lot of time in internal meetings explaining how hashtags worked and why it was okay to have negative customer opinions appear alongside positive ones on Burberry’s Instagram posts. 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. Bailey didn’t have to defend his Instagram-inspired strategy for long. A month after the runway event, Bailey’s boss, Angela Ahrendts, left to be an executive at Apple. Soon after, Bailey was promoted to CEO.

The iPhones that Burberry celebrated that year included software directly influenced by Instagram. For the first time, iPhones offered a way to take photos in square format, so they would be ready to post on the app without having to be configured or edited. Apple also added some of its own filters directly into its camera tool.

2013

Burberry’s runway show, but also a meal hosted by chef Jamie Oliver. Oliver had been one of the first celebrities to sign up for Instagram, long before the Facebook acquisition. Systrom, introduced to the chef by an investor, had nervously created an account for him at a dinner.

Twitter was preparing to go public. Nobody knew how valuable Wall Street would consider Twitter to be, or whether it would end up a formidable competitor to Facebook in the eyes of investors. Mark Zuckerberg, always fiercely competitive, wasn’t going to take any chances.

Mark Zuckerberg started referring to any Twitteresque posts on Facebook as “public content,” and started saying on earnings calls with investors that he wanted to make this type of posting a priority for the company. He wanted Facebook to be better at Twitter than Twitter was. A bonus of this strategy was it gave people more things to post and talk about on Facebook. With every year people were on Facebook, they were broadening their friend networks. It turned out that even if “connecting the world” was a great business objective, synonymous with growth, the side effect was that everyone’s feed was full of loose acquaintances. Almost a decade after the company’s founding, Facebook users were less willing to post about their more intimate observations and life events for this wider audience.

Celebrities were often confused by the two products being part of the same organization but having different rules and strategies. Facebook, unlike Instagram and Twitter, was willing to dole out incentives to encourage celebrities and media organizations to create the kind of content they wanted. The main currency they used to reward such behavior with public figures was not straight cash, but ad credits—tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in free advertising on Facebook. Tatum received some in exchange for the baby post, to promote an upcoming movie, but only because he posted on Facebook too, not just Instagram. That was more valuable than what the celebrity magazines would provide.

Instagram again had a chance to beat Facebook’s competition in a different way than Facebook could. For better or worse, the app had become the perfect place for seemingly spontaneous moments that had actually been coordinated by corporate branding teams over months. Even without the company’s help, brands were finding value on Instagram, fueled by outside advertising dollars and a growing crop of users who realized they could make a living on the app,

Right before joining Instagram in 2013, he was managing Facebook’s PR around its relationship with outside game developers, who were building businesses on top of Facebook users’ friend networks. (This open data-sharing with the developers would, in 2018, get Facebook in trouble with regulators worldwide.)

Brands overall were paying about $100 million—an experimental sum—for the new kind of work in 2014, but the industry was about to explode. As the Instagram user guidelines stated, in a tone as if talking to a child: “When you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram, it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.… We ask that you keep your interactions on Instagram meaningful and genuine.” “Meaningful and genuine,” in this case, just meant that any kind of branding had to look unforced, like it had been an organic decision on the part of the person posting about

Instagram employees did want their product to be commercially important, to be big and successful and competitive with Twitter, to contribute meaningfully enough to Facebook that they wouldn’t be swallowed up and ruined by the larger company. It was just better if it looked effortless. No journalist would be asked to profile Charles Porch or the community team;

unlike Instagram, didn’t have any sort of human curation, or an opinion on what ideal Twitter content looked like. Twitter, like Facebook, billed itself as a neutral platform, governed by whatever the masses wanted to see, through their retweeting and commenting on content. Twitter executives would say they were the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

Back in 2014, three months after the Vogue cover, Instagram announced that it had reached 300 million users and thus eclipsed Twitter in size. Ev Williams, Twitter’s cofounder, finally said publicly what he’d said privately all those times he had passed on buying Instagram: “If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant,” he told Fortune. “Important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.” What Porch understood, which everyone else eventually would, was that Instagram’s power lay not in what was posted there, but in how those posts made people feel.

“Facebook buying Instagram was like putting it in a microwave. In a microwave, the food gets hotter faster, but you can easily ruin the dish.” —FORMER INSTAGRAM EXECUTIVE

If Instagram wanted to be as big as Facebook, they could copy the strategy. But Kevin Systrom thought leaning too heavily on Facebook would be dangerous. He did want to be big, but he didn’t want to be Facebook. He wanted to recruit the best talent, but didn’t want them to bring over Facebook’s grow-at-all-costs values. Instagram, still tiny by comparison, was surrounded by Facebook’s culture. Even with more users than Twitter, and almost a third of Facebook’s users, Instagram had fewer than 200 employees, compared to more than 3,000 at Twitter and more than 10,000 at Facebook.

Unlike Facebook, where employees looked for technical solutions that reached the most users, Instagram solved problems in a way that was intimate, creative, and relationship-based, sometimes even at the individual level if the user was important enough to warrant it.

Just like Facebook employees had been indoctrinated into the “connecting the world” mission, Instagram employees were buying their own branding. But cracks in Instagram’s careful, relationship-based plan were starting to show. As more users joined Instagram, the small team became more disconnected from the experience of the average person.

Enthusiasts weren’t the only ones getting strategic. Barnieh watched new cafes all around the world adopt aesthetics that were popular on Instagram. They would hang bare Edison bulbs, buy succulent planters, make their spaces brighter, fill the walls with greenery or mirrors, and advertise items that were more eye-catching, like colorful fruit juices or avocado toast. In their quest to look modern, he thought they all ended up looking the same, the way airports and corporate offices all look the same.

National Geographic wrote about how Instagram was changing travel: visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014. “What photos of this iconic vista don’t reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot,” the magazine wrote.

the company was in the midst of convincing official advertisers to spend money on the app for the first time. If marketers knew a significant portion of the Instagrammers were bots, they wouldn’t be as interested in paying money to reach them.

THE SNAPCHAT PROBLEM “What people are experiencing on Instagram is, they don’t feel good about themselves. It feels terrible. They have to compete for popularity.” —EVAN SPIEGEL, SNAPCHAT CEO