15 Seconds is a lot of time
My reaction to the release of Instagram Video
With the release of Instagram video , I found the choice of 15 seconds to be very interesting. I think 15 seconds presents a big opportunity but not without its risks. The average commercial is 15 seconds. This is the most obvious reason why Instagram chose this amount of time. They will need to generate revenue somehow. This will be a lot more difficult than the average person thinks, as Steve Cheney, Head of Biz Dev at GroupMe mentioned in a fantastic blog post. As Steve said, thinking Instagram’s advertising dollars can be similar to those of television ads is foolish. However, I do believe that Instagram will find a way to leverage its vast amount of data to be able to generate revenue somehow with these videos.
On the other hand, 15 seconds seems like a ton of time when I am
leisurely scrolling down my newsfeed. I do not have time to spend watching all of my friends’ videos. Instagram has always been the app I go to when I have one to two minutes free. I’d quickly scroll down and
see the cool pics people I follow were taking, “like” some of them and
get back to whatever it was I was waiting for. Adding 15 second videos completely changes the use case for when I should open Instagram. In the 1-2 minutes I scroll the app, I will only be able to watch 4-6 videos compared to being able to potentially see 10 times that amount in photos in that timeframe
This presents a big risk in terms of having videos and photos in the same feed. The obvious move by Instagram will be separating the feeds, which I hope they will do sooner rather than later.
A smaller risk 15 seconds poses is the production effort that goes
into 15 seconds. The 6 seconds of Vine was short enough that not much thinking was required and it took very little effort to make an
effective and entertaining Vine. The ability to take 15 seconds of quality video is a difficult task, one that I do not believe I or many users have the skills for. Yes, taking less than the 15 seconds of video solves this problem, but given the option to go longer, people will use that to their advantage and potentially make worse videos. 15 seconds is a lot of time for the average person to create an awesome video. The biggest aspect I enjoyed about Vine was the limit on time, which in my mind made the majority of videos look great, unless I only saw people that were talented at vining.
All in all, despite the risks a 15 second video poses, I hope and believe Instagram has thought this out in detail and will make the additions
of video successful, having the benefit of sharing to Facebook as a
huge boost. I have already spoken to several friends that have deleted
Vine, as they would prefer to share with their existing followers on
Instagrams rather than building another follower base on Vine. Additionally, as CNBC’s Eli Langer stated, daily Vine shares on Twitter have dropped a massive 50% since the launch of Instagram video. It is clear that people are heading in masses to take their videos making to Instagram and it will be interesting to see if they can capitalize and actually generate revenue with the 15 seconds.
