IGTV is an island for creators, making it hard for viewers to reach
IGTV offers a brand new platform for videos — but it’s a few clicks away.
Introducing Instagram TV (IGTV)
On June 20th, the Instagram team went live and introduced a new feature to their photo-sharing app: IGTV. The new feature was a response for creator’s need for longer content.
Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, highlighted IGTV with three goals:
Mobile first: IGTV is bult for how you actually use your phone: vertical and full screen.
According to Instagram, there’s 40% decrease of teens watching TV and a 60% increase of teens watching IG videos. Due to the nature of “Stories,” Instagram is betting it all with vertical content.
Simple and Intuitive: It starts playing as soon as you open the app. You don’t have to search or browse to get started, and it’s easy to multitask.
In an attempt to make Instagram adapt the good parts of TV, once you open IGTV a video will start playing. Similarly, you can “browse through channels” the same way you would with a TV remote. Simply swipe and another video starts playing.
Curated: IGTV is focused on the creators you love most and already follow on Instagram.
The search bar uses creator’s names as a database, not the content. This means that hashtags will be out of the question and the creators themselves will be at the center of discovery.
Below you can watch the live stream in which IGTV was announced:
It’s an island for creators, but far for viewers to reach
In a news feed saturated with pictures, videos, stories, and carousels, it is hard to find a special place for the newly created IGTV. Much like stories, IGTV has its own user interface where you can browse seamlessly from video to video. But the feature is not built around content — instead, it’s around creators. The problem is, IGTV feels so separated from the Instagram experience: much like an island, you will have to travel quite a bit to get to the content you want — and it’s already showing.
If you watched the live stream, you might remember Lele Pons. Upon IGTV’s reveal and opportunity for longer content, Lele Pons revealed her upcoming show “What’s Cooking?” where she invites guests to try and cook new recipes.
The episode boasts 3.4 million views and 83k likes at the time of writing, a bit under the mark for someone with 25 million followers. The episodes are not anything out of the ordinary, in fact there is a resemblance to some what early YouTube Red Originals did.
But now, let’s look at a video published normally on her Instagram account.
A one minute skit posted a day after her IGTV went live now has (at the time of writing) 9.8 million views and 1.5 million likes. This is +6.4 million views and +670k likes more than what her IGTV episode accomplished.
Sure enough, it is a drastic drop on engagement for content. This can be attributed to either IGTV not released entirely (it’s still scheduled to release worldwide in the following weeks) and that it is also an entire new section. Users are almost always against change. Only time will tell if users continue to stray from new features.
Interestingly enough, we have seen this type of behavior with Periscope.tv and Twitter. Back in December 2016, Twitter fully integrated live video into its app — powered by Periscope. Instagram said that IGTV is also planned to release as a standalone-app, and perhaps that is what will catch on with the many teens that are watching videos exclusively on Instagram.
Educating the customer is always the hardest part
When watching the live event on Instagram’s profile, the team focused on selling you three things about IGTV: vertical, quick, and curated videos. As is tradition when new features are added to social media platforms, users are not sure exactly how to use them. It takes a while before we start seeing creative content.
But in the coming days, Instagram’s marketing team will have to put extra work on educating creators how exactly to maximize their efforts on IGTV. On the day of release, many of the creators I follow cropped an already existing video and re-purposed it for IGTV; others added borders above and below the horizontal video to make it into a vertical ratio.
Within its first days of release I have seen content on IGTV be under a minute long, ironically the main premise for IGTV was to allow for videos longer than one minute. Additionally, users are uploading recorded Live Streams. It’s fine — people can upload whatever they want to their channels. The way I thought IGTV would develop was as long-form produced content. Instagram sold me on the idea with the video below:
Given the final product, one can see that the video was shot on mobile, and rather than being executed like a live stream would be, it was edited and had added graphics to it. Produced and edited content is what distinguishes YouTube, and if Instagram wants to compete for YouTube’s teen audiences, the IG team has a lot of educating to do.
Too soon to know
To me, it is clear that IGTV aims to tread on YouTube’s space, but the fact that the feature is centered on discovering users rather than content is what intrigues me the most. I can go on YouTube and search “coffee” and get hundreds of channels that cover coffee. Same goes with Facebook Watch (don’t forget it still counts as a video platform)! But were you to search for “coffee” on IGTV, only users with the name explicitly written as “coffee” would appear - neither do hashtags help.
It leaves me to wonder if IGTV is really the best move for Instagram. Minute videos do exemplary well, and many Instagram influencers have gained a huge traction thanks to the Explore section. Perhaps we have to wait and see how the standalone app does when it debuts.
Got any thoughts to add? Tweet me @juliangumbo or comment below!
Julian Gamboa is a UC Berkeley graduate with a focus on marketing. Julian was selected as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Marketing and #Social Media (2017) and a Course Instructor of the marketing and digital publishing course Digital Marketing Today at the Haas School of Business. He is also the founder of Digiviewpoint, a millennial publishing account.
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