Instagram. Tama Leaver
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ephemeral, disappearing nature of Stories was dulled somewhat with the appearance of Stories Highlights, where users could gather a collection of themed Story segments and prominently display them on their main profile. Here, the balance between the ephemerality of communication and the performativity of the main Instagram profile seemingly allowed the best of both worlds for Instagram.
Stories not only became the research and development space for Instagram, where almost all new tools, integrations and changes were first rolled out, but Stories opened Instagram to other partnerships, either integrating messages from other platforms like Spotify to add what users are listening to, or deeper integrations where content and media from third parties were integrated into the Stories toolkit and experience. The inclusions of animated GIFs and music ‘stickers’ are two prominent examples of these strategic integrations and partnerships. The normalization of vertical video in Instagram (and other platform) Stories even led to the mid-2018 launch of IGTV – InstaGram TeleVision – both as a standalone app, and integrated into the main Instagram app, which initially supported video of up to sixty minutes. Whether vertical video has as much appeal as Stories remains to be seen, but IGTV is just one more example of terrain Instagram has explored thanks to the Stories format. IGTV has also allowed Instagram quietly to explore streaming video in part to combat newer platforms like Twitch that attract more and more viewers.
GIF Stickers
While GIFs (short animated images) have a much longer history than Instagram, having been very popular on the early web, they were for a time quite uncommon online, only to have had a major resurgence with the popularity of reaction GIFs, both standalone, on tumblr, and, significantly, embedded into many popular platforms, including Twitter and Facebook (Highfield & Leaver 2016; Miltner & Highfield 2017). While not encoded in the GIF format, the aesthetic norms of GIFs are evident in Instagram’s Boomerang app (and Boomerang button in Stories), which captures a very short video clip which is then looped backwards and forwards. However, by late January 2018 it was clear that GIFs were an important expressive form that Instagram had not yet capitalized on, so the platform released GIF Stickers for Stories, allowing GIFs to be added to and overlaid on Instagram Stories. Like Snapchat, Instagram partnered with the company Giphy to deliver a moderated library of GIFs to Instagram users. The addition of GIF Stickers, like the Stories format itself, was clearly aimed at keeping teens and younger users on Instagram, ensuring they have the full visual social media suite of tools to express themselves.
The integration of GIFs on Instagram also shows one of the challenges in integrating third-party services and content. Just a month after the stickers were launched, Instagram quickly removed all GIFs from their platform after a highly offensive and racist GIF was found, shared and then decried on social media (Constine 2018e). A few weeks later the GIF Sticker returned to Instagram, but only after some very careful media in which Giphy took complete responsibility for the racist GIF slipping onto Instagram (and Snapchat), and promised such content would never make it through to the carefully moderated library that Giphy provides to third parties, including Instagram (Welch 2018). Giphy’s tightened moderation appears to have worked, with no notable complaints since this one incident, but this example does serve as a reminder that Instagram includes content from a range of sources and other companies and platforms, so that decisions about content are not just exercises in moderating users and their media, but also decisions about what other material to draw onto Instagram, and what to avoid. All of these decisions shape the experience and use of Instagram as a platform.
Music Stickers
The official integration of music into Instagram came relatively late given the enormous success of Musical.ly, which eclipsed Snapchat’s number of users in 2017 and was purchased by and integrated into TikTok (or douyin in China) in 2018 (Price 2018). TikTok allows teens to lip sync and perform to fifteen-second clips from various songs and audio sources. The affordances and limitations of the platform shaped these performances; recordings could be done in slow or fast time, but no extra audio and no other text or visual elements (emoji or gifs) could be added. This led to a rich, vibrant shared lexicon of hand signs and gestural meaning which tended to add emphasis and depth to performances (Rettberg 2017). Thus, when Instagram added Song Stickers to Instagram Stories in mid-2018, the stickers completely replaced any audio from the story, in keeping with the norms teens and others had learnt and brought with them from using Musical.ly/TikTok/douyin.
Moreover, Instagram’s initial release of the Music Stickers happened just weeks before Musical.ly’s purchase by TikTok and the Musical.ly app was removed (with users forcibly migrated to TikTok), a perfect time to capture some of those Musical.ly users (or ‘musers’) who felt alienated by the forced transition to a new service (Spangler 2018). As with Giphy and GIFs, though, integrating music into Stories is a complicated balance of technical and legal issues. Initially Music Stickers were only released in Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Sweden, the UK and the US, under the umbrella licensing deal Facebook struck with a range of music corporations including Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music as well as a number of independent licensing agencies (Dredge 2018). Instagram users in other countries not covered by this deal initially saw a label indicating music is not available in their region (as discussed in chapter 3). Overall, though, the integration of music, GIFs, and other content into Stories, with little fanfare, shows the ongoing importance of Stories as the format and area where Instagram’s changes, growth and development are most tightly focused.
A Business Model
When Facebook purchased Instagram for US$1 billion, it is worth remembering that at that time Instagram had not made a single cent in profit. The platform was very popular and growing rapidly, but there was no existing business model in place. While Facebook clearly had their eye on monetization from the beginning, Instagram only began experimenting with official advertisements in October 2013, and then only in the United States. Every advertisement featured a prominent ‘Sponsored’ notification (as official advertisements still do), but were relatively rare in the main feed. While the platform was slow and careful in rolling out advertising more widely, by September 2015 the Instagram advertising tools were made available to anyone who wanted to use them, for advertising across the entire platform. As Instagram became more and more popular for advertisers, the number of paid messages in the main feed reached as high as one in four or five, but the gradual roll out meant that people became acclimatized slowly to the change, and no significant resistance or protest was registered. As Instagram Stories increased in popularity, specific advertising tools were released for Stories, with Shopping Stickers rolling out in 2018, as well as direct sales links also in 2018, allowing Instagram users to make purchases without leaving the platform at all.
Somewhat more controversially, though, Instagram also became home for a less official economy in the form of sponsored, promoted and paid messages delivered by Influencers. While the Influencer economy is explored in far more detail in chapter 4, it is still worth noting that the difficulty in balancing communication with commerce is most evident when examining Influencer practices. Initially, Influencers rarely declared when their content was paid sponsorship, which led to a range of controversies. In most cases, national advertising standards were unclear as to whether existing rules required Influencers to declare when posts were paid advertising, but over the last few years these rules have tightened significantly. In June 2017 Instagram tried to defuse this tension by giving Influencers (and all business accounts) a tool to declare that specific posts were ‘Paid Partnership With’ the specific brand or company. While this and other changes are important, finding the right balance between official advertising, the economy of Influencers, and a platform premised on authentic sharing and personal communication, remains an ongoing