Does Instagram Care Less About Watch Time?

Adam Mosseri says Instagram focuses way less on watch time than the competition, and it still cares about watch time. Long-form video succeeds on Instagram only when it grows the pie in more ways than watch time.

YouTube puts watch time at the top, and Netflix and other subscription businesses put watch time and subscribers at the top. Instagram looks at how likely you are to watch most of a video and how much of a video it thinks you will watch. It also cares about sends, comments, likes, and story shares. Long-form video can grow how much time people spend on Instagram. Spending that time at the expense of the other things Instagram cares about is not a success, so long form has to contribute back.

A period of bringing more video into Instagram and Facebook, maybe a version before Reels, drove up watch time and was bad for DMs, stories sharing, original photo sharing, original video sharing, revenue, and revenue per hour. Watching one video for 20 minutes can replace about 100 things you could have sent to a friend, liked from a friend, or commented on. Reels became very accretive to Instagram when they became more social: you see a video, send it to a friend, connect over the video, and they maybe watch something else. Watch time grew, and so did messages, retention, and the number of people who use Instagram in a given day. Long form needs a path like that to be truly successful.