When Instagram announced it was launching a smart TV app last year, it immediately raised questions over whether long-form content would make a comeback.
We’re starting to get some answers.
“I don’t think that short vertical content is going to be enough to succeed on TV,” Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s vice president of product, said at the Scalable Summit on May 6.
Lyons added that the company is still in the early stages of figuring out exactly what its TV strategy will look like, but said: “It’s hard to imagine that it isn't gonna include some long-form content,” she said.
That could also mean podcasts. While there are plenty of podcast clips on the platform, Instagram so far has stayed away from dedicated tools, even as its competitors and sister app Threads have leaned in.
In the meantime, Instagram also has some work to do on its core app. Reels has become a bigger rival to TikTok, helping creators grow and find niche audiences. But that’s also making it harder for creators to reach their followers consistently. Lyons acknowledged that Instagram needs to strike a better balance between the two. “It’s something we need to fix,” she said.
Growing regulatory scrutiny is also shaping how Instagram builds products, Lyons said. Countries around the world are moving to ban social media apps for teens, while Meta and YouTube were recently found liable in a landmark social media addiction case.
We dove into all of this and more on stage, including what it takes to break through as a creator today and whether follower counts still matter.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Scalable: You have been at Meta for 12 years and at Instagram for more than seven. What have been the biggest changes that you've seen during that time?
Lyons: A lot inside of Instagram feels like it’s been really stable. I still work with a lot of the same people I've worked with for these last seven years.
The way that people want to interact on social media and want to be entertained has changed a lot, and we’ve had to really keep pace with that change. Instagram was originally square photos from accounts you followed in chronological order. If you think about how different that is from the Instagram that exists today, that’s a lot of change in not that long a period of time.
There’s been upside of that for creators, and I think there’s also been real tension that’s come from that, that we’ve had to navigate.
Reels has gotten really good—it's taken a while to get there.
I really appreciate hearing that. I was the original product manager on Reels five years ago. If we had been here five years ago, I feel like your vibe would not have been that Reels is really good. We still have a long way to go, but I am really proud of the team.
Reels is helping creators grow and find niche audiences. The downside is that it’s getting harder and harder to reach your followers consistently. How do you balance that, where you’re not just constantly serving these videos to new audiences?
This is a real tension and thing that we have to get right and manage … Getting that balance right is a large part of my job leading the ranking and recommendation teams.
We’re thinking about how we keep the good things of recommendations, which is discovering interests you might never have known you had. I've become obsessed with the moon mission, Artemis II. I have followed this so closely through Reels. I discovered [it] in my Reels feed because another friend had liked it and I saw it come up in recommendations.
At the same time, that loss of control is real, and I think that it's something we need to fix.
We're doing this in a couple of ways. For users, we launched a product recently called Your Algorithm … that's one way in which we're thinking about giving people control of what they see. On the creator side, I think we need to do a lot more to give creators control over how they're reaching audiences. One of the products that we've launched is called Trials. I think we have a lot of room to make Trials even better.
Why do you think no one else has copied Trials yet? We haven't seen TikTok or YouTube do it yet.
I've heard that some are.
The way that Trials works is it enables creators to share Reels that bypass their connected following. We kept hearing from creators that they were afraid to take creative chances because they didn't want to alienate their existing following, but they also wanted to find new audiences and express themselves in new ways.
A lot of creators are also using it for A/B testing, like trying different hooks and trying different things, which as a product person, I love. I'm like: All these creators are product people! That to me is a great example of a product that we can build to help creators have more control over how they're reaching their audiences and how they're growing to find new audiences.
Everything in general has become so much more personalized and fragmented now. There is less of a shared monoculture in general. To succeed today as a creator, do you just have to go so incredibly niche or can you still get to the level of a MrBeast?
I definitely think that's still possible. I also think there's a lot of beauty in the nicheness. There were a lot of communities that were underserved by monocultures. What we’re seeing now is people finding these incredible communities that are forming around interest that previously weren't getting that much investment and attention.
“Heated Rivalry” is something that I discovered on my Reels. I was seeing all these clips of it over the holidays. I was seeing a bunch of my friends liking and sharing this content, and I found this community of people who are into “Heated Rivalry.”
That kind of niche community became a pretty big community pretty quickly, and really transcended a lot of different audiences. It didn't totally break into straight men, but I feel like that could come in season two. I feel like that's one where this niche community really catapulted it into a bigger level of culture.
The lines are also really blurring. We’re watching movies on our phones and YouTubers on TV screens. Instagram’s gotten into the mix recently with a new connected TV app. What's the vision there? Especially because so much of your content is vertical, which I don't think is very well-suited to TV.
One of the things that Instagram particularly has done really well is understand where people are going and figuring out how we can help to meet them there and deliver on our mission there. It is true that people are watching more and more on TV.
TV watch time is social often, right? It's people sitting with their spouse, roommates, friends and connecting over something. We also kept hearing through research that a lot of people were just streaming and casting their Reels onto TV. We would do research sessions with teens and young adults where they were like, ‘Yeah, at the end of the day we just get together in someone's living room and we watch our Reels feeds together on TV.’
What we started with in December is like a really MVP first take. It is short vertical content organized into channels around different interests. What we're finding is there are some audiences for whom it's working really, really well. There is definitely a market for short vertical content on TV.
I don't think that short vertical content is going to be enough to succeed on TV. A thing that we're thinking about is how do we best serve the creators who do short-form content, but also do long-form content who right now might use Reels as a discovery channel for clips to market their podcasts, but who also produce longer form. How can we better deliver for those creators and also make it easier for consumers who are seeing great clips of content in Reels and want to go deeper on the full content.
Similar to the fact that Reels was a multi-year journey, I think getting this right on TV is going to be a multi-year journey, but it's one that we're really committed to.
So does this mean long-form content is back? I remember the IGTV days, which did not end well for Instagram. Are you going to start incentivizing longer-form content?
I think that's going to be part of it. We’re still early in figuring out exactly how we can best help creators and consumers on this mobile and TV journey.
It’s hard to imagine that it isn't gonna include some long-form content. The question for us and the thing we're talking to creators about right now is how can we best help them at the moment?
You have a podcast. I'm curious where you think Instagram should play, what you would want. What the missing things are that we could really help with.
We’ve seen so many clips all over Reels, but there's not really an easy way to then get to your podcast. YouTube has tried to do this with Shorts and linking to longer form. Threads has done this where you can put your podcast on your profile. Instagram hasn't done anything with podcasting. Is that something that might change?
Yeah, that's definitely something that we're looking at. Nothing concrete right now to announce.
If you project forward two years from now and you think about Instagram being a meaningful part of a creator's long-form and TV strategy in addition to their mobile short-form strategy, I think a piece of that is going to be podcasts. I think a piece of that is going to be live. I think a piece of that is going to be short-form dramas.
We're living in an exciting time of these formats giving creators more ways of telling stories. Audiences are increasingly getting a lot of value out of things that are a little longer.
Right now we're posting podcast clips and linking to our ManyChat to send people the episode. We love ManyChat, but I feel like there’s some steps that can be removed there.
I feel like we could make that easier for you.
So AI is obviously the top priority for Meta right now. In this world where AI is the priority, what's your message to creators? How is it helping them? How are you thinking about AI for creators, as well as all the AI slop? How are you feeling about all these things?
We're pretty clear on the fact that Instagram is about connecting real people around human creativity. AI can be a tool for creators to express themselves, but the thing at the end of the day that we are focused on is human storytelling.
The strategy that we're taking at the moment is: we think there's lots of really cool ways that AI can help creators tell their stories. So one that we're excited about is translations. I think we have 500 million views of AI-translated content a week on Instagram now. What's really impressive about them is that it's not just that we do the voice translation, but your lips sync to the voice translation, so it looks seamless.
On the consumer side, I think there's a lot that we can do to help people better discover [content.] The Your Algorithm product that we have is only possible because of AI. We're able to do content understanding to see what type of content you're engaging with, and then we can use that to figure out what we think you're interested in. If you tell us you're interested in something else, we can then fan out to find content that's about that topic. This content-aware ranking is pretty different from the ranking we were doing a few years ago.
It is true that we are currently in a moment of a lot of AI slop, which I think is normal with new technologies and new tools. You go through a wave of this, and we're working hard to clamp down on that because that is not what we're excited about.
Teen safety has also been one of the biggest themes over the past few months. We are seeing countries around the world move to ban social media apps for teens. Meta and YouTube were also recently found liable in a landmark social media addiction lawsuit in California. I've seen Instagram's advertising campaigns promoting new teen safety products from the New York City subway to my feed. How does all of this regulation and scrutiny impact how you're building products now?
It has a huge impact. Our goal is to be leading the way on teen safety. A couple years ago we launched Instagram teen accounts, and that was really our effort to listen to teens, parents and experts to understand what their concerns were with young people on Instagram and respond to them.
The concerns were broadly in three buckets: One was, who could contact teens? Like, could people that you didn't know reach out to you? Because that obviously has a bunch of safety concerns. The other was time teens were spending online, like if they were spending too much time at night, and then the third was the content they were seeing.
We spent a bunch of time making sure that the content teens see on Instagram is consistent with what they would see in a 13-plus movie or TV show, so that parents can feel comfortable that they're not seeing content on Instagram they wouldn't see if they went to the movies or turned on TV.
Through all of that, we're giving parents and guardians more oversight and supervision into what their teens are doing online. So I'm super proud of our teen accounts. I think we will continue to invest in this area because we know that to be leading the way, we're going to have to continue to make progress.
We are doing work in good faith to comply with the bans where they exist. Our perspective is that those bans are not the best way to keep teens safe online. Like we've all been teenagers. I don't think that if you ban a few social media apps, teens are going to stop using the internet. What I feel my responsibility is as a product leader is to build a product that I feel proud of, that I think is leading the way on teen safety. And to have that be a better alternative to bans.
So many teens are creators themselves, or they love watching creators, or creators have huge teen audiences. So let's say that these bans spread across the world. They come to the US and teenagers cannot be on social media. What's the impact of that on the creator economy?
Creativity can't be banned, and I think that people will continue expressing themselves, creating and sharing. Maybe that sharing will move to DMs and messaging. Maybe it will find other homes. But I do think that taking away outlets for creativity and outlets for community that are well managed and have strong supervision from teens will have negative consequences on their safety and on the creator economy more broadly.
I want to go back to our conversation about breaking through and how to succeed. You talk to so many creators, you see what's working. What are the different strategies you're seeing? Are there certain verticals? Are there certain things that people are doing now that are really working with Instagram?
There’s two things that are worth understanding. One is the content ecosystem that we're trying to create, and then the other is how our ranking system works.
So in terms of the content ecosystem we're trying to create, we're pretty opinionated that we want it to be original and timely and that we want it to be the kind of content that brings people together.
Adam [Mosseri] who leads Instagram, just posted about this last week. We're really clamping down on unoriginal photos and carousels just as we've done for videos. The reason for that is because we want the people who are doing the creative work to get the value of that distribution rather than like aggregators or others.
In terms of timeliness, I'm really proud of the fact that now 30% of Reel's impressions are from the last day, which is double what it was a year ago. To me, what that speaks to you for creators is sharing regularly and expecting to get real-time feedback on what you're sharing.
In terms of like content that's bringing people together in community, if you are sharing content that people are re-sharing, that people are talking about, that people are seeing, their friends are liking, that's the kind of stuff that we're excited to have succeed on Instagram. The creators who are doing this well are the ones who are authentically producing original content that has a point of view that is recent and timely. They're doing it regularly, and it's content that's investing in their community over time.
In terms of how the ranking system works, we really redid our entire recommendation system in the last few years. The easiest way to think about it is like our own version of American Idol, where a piece of content—regardless of how large the following of the creator is—starts auditioning on a small stage. If it does well, it graduates to a larger stage. And if it does well there, it graduates to an even larger stage.
Our goal here is to make it fair for creators of different following sizes to all have a chance to break out and find their audience. As it’s going through these graduation waves, we're not just showing it to like a random group of people, we're trying to find the audience for whom it's resonating and showing it more and more to those people.
If something's not working, take creative chances, try something else. Use Trials. Keep experimenting because our goal is to reward you when content is hitting with your community. And to help you find that community in the first place.
How has the importance of different metrics changed over time? It used to be that follower count was the definitive thing. Is it views that matter now? Shares? Do follower accounts matter anymore?
It depends on what you're trying to achieve. The answer can vary creator by creator, but I do think it's true that more matters than just followers.
If you are trying to build and reach a community, then the views and the reach that you're achieving is a really important metric of that, independent of whether they follow you or not. If you are trying to create a community around that, then the fact that they're resharing content matters a ton.
One of the things that we're thinking about is, how can we do a better job of educating creators and brands on the metrics that matter so that creators feel like they can go to brands and say like, Hey, yes, this is my follower account, but like this is how reliably I'm able to reach a large audience and this is like who's in that audience. There's more that we can do there.
