Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - When Will Instagram Pay their Creators?

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

A few weeks ago Marques got a chance to sit down with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri and ask him about everything from how creators make money on the platform to how the company views AI creators. Enjoy! Music provided by Epidemic Sound Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to a bonus episode of the Wayform podcast. In this episode, I'm going to be sitting down and interviewing one-on-one, the CEO of Instagram, Adam Sari. This is a really interesting interview. I'm coming at it from the perspective of a creator. I upload to a bunch of different platforms, which I'm totally transparent about. You guys know me as a YouTuber, but I also make shorts, and I make Instagram content, and then also TikTok stuff here and there. And so I do have a lot of thoughts on each individual platform,

and I thought it would be interesting to ask him some of my questions about how Instagram has come to be what it is today, where it came from, where they're going into the future, and pay careful attention to the way he answers the same question, both at the beginning of the interview about what Instagram is and at the end of the interview because it's a different answer

and I think it's really interesting to see the framing and the way we talk about the platform and yes we talk about paying creators too so stay tuned for all of that without any further ado here's your bonus episode interviewing the CEO of Instagram Adam is there

all right Adam thanks for joining me thanks for having me yeah appreciate the time okay so you're the CEO of Instagram and I'm a creator I work on a bunch of different platforms I know what I think Instagram is, but it'll be cool hearing your own words.

What is Instagram today? So it's changed a lot. I, for better for worse, I got a lot of feedback, and I think that's fundamentally a good thing. But at the heart of what we do has always been to try to bring people together over creativity. You know, we started out by making it so that anybody with an idea could make a photo that they were having, that they were confident sharing with those pretty intense filters and borders. Remember them? Yeah.

Yeah, that was pretty opinionated in retrospect. But how people connect with their friends has changed, how they communicate has changed, how they entertain themselves has changed. And so we've had to evolve. But at the heart has always been these two ideas of connecting with the people you care about over your interests. Connecting with the people you care about. I mean, it's a social network, obviously.

For sure. But it has both chronological and algorithmic ways of sharing stuff with you, sharing stuff between people. and there's a lot of features that have been added on top over the years which is why I wonder how you think about how to add a new feature to Instagram you probably get tons of suggestions

and ideas about things to add things to add things to remove exactly what's your filter like how do you decide like okay we were just photos this many years ago now it's all these things how do you decide what to add to Instagram I think it has to be connected to

creativity or connecting people but then it also has to be something that is going to be cared about or we think used by enough people that it'll matter. Because obviously the app is getting more and more complicated. I think we need to do more to actually simplify things and collapse some of the patterns into less patterns. But we also have to evolve.

The biggest risk of any platform of our scale is that the world changes and we fail to adapt and we slowly become irrelevant. People think of Instagram as a feed of square photos with those borders. But if you look, at the last 10 years, you know, if we didn't have stories, if we didn't have DMs, if we didn't have reels, we wouldn't be talking today. We wouldn't be an important enough platform to really be a platform that you focused on. And so we've had to figure out how to evolve

and try to stay true to those principles and then try to also keep the app simple. Sometimes we do better or worse at one or the other. Sounds like a balancing act. Because I mean, keeping it simple is on one end of the spectrum and keeping up with all the competition and all the evolving things happening in the world as another. Are you leaning towards one end or the other? I mean, you have a lot of competition now. I make videos on five platforms that accept video uploads. Like, how do you think about...

More and more creditors do that, too. Yeah. And I used to never do that, but, you know, that's a slightly different language that I speak to each of those audiences. It's a different audiences. Yeah. So, depending on the year, we'll focus more in building new things or simplifying. But in general, my bias is going to be to make sure that we are taking risks.

I think that what happens a lot with large companies is they slowly go down, hitting their goals the whole way down. And I would much rather look back at five, ten years of working on the app and have a couple examples of where we pushed too hard or went too fast and we got some blowback for it. Then the alternative, which I see is primarily

like you never upset anybody, but you also didn't evolve fast enough and you just matter a lot less. So I'm going to bias and I think we as a cultured Instagram bias towards trying to take some bigger bets and trying to take on some risk and sometimes they will pan out

and sometimes they will be painful. Fair enough. I definitely feel like that applies in a lot of different genres. It applies as a creator. If I just do the same thing over and over, I'll be happy because I'm achieving the goal of doing the same thing,

but I'll probably get left behind. And in other product categories, that's the same thing. Like you can make the same product over and over, but then your competition will pass you. Yeah. But when you think about those risks, you know, there are some that you decide not to take, obviously, and there are some that you decide are worth the challenge of, like, pushing yourself forward. Yeah.

Is there some sort of filter you run through to decide, like, okay, this would be cool, but I don't think it's the right direction for Instagram. Yeah, there's a couple different things. One thing I talk about a lot internally with my team is, like, it needs to matter. And for something to matter, it either has to be, like, novel and interesting, or it has to actually meaningfully move the app forward or the business forward. If it's a small change, but it's not interesting, it's not novel, and it's not going to really change how people use the app, then it's probably just noise.

It also has to be connected to what we do. Like we're going to, for instance, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about AI today. We're going to try to figure out in what ways AI can help empower creators and power creatives connect people as opposed to all the other things that AI can also do. So it has to be connected to our mission. and our reason to exist. But you also have to decide how many. So I'll give you an example that's maybe a little bit less obvious from the outside.

Usually we're talking about how many, you know, we're talking more about how many new features to build. But one of the most important things about Instagram is how ranking works. And there's a couple, you could call them bets that we are making that don't maximize the amount of time people spend on Instagram or revenue we make or engagement that we have. So we focus a lot, for instance, on originality. making sure that we try and drive as much traffic or distribution to the original content creator

versus an aggregator. That actually leaves engagement and revenue on the table. But the bet is over time you will build more of a rapport with the creative community and that will benefit in some indirect way over years. Timeliness, similarly. If you want to be culturally relevant, things need to break quickly. But sometimes you're going to drive more engagement by showing something that was really funny that's five days old.

So how many of those bets can you take on at once is another thing that we have to juggle? Interesting. And I think what a lot of people also wonder is how much of that comes from meta. Obviously, you're a part of meta, but to some degree independent, how much of this comes from meta's goals and meta's decision-making in budgets versus what Instagram independently thinks that they should be doing? It's a balance depending on the year. But in general, there are a few ways in which we try to make sure we're supporting the broader company.

We also try to make sure that we're leveraging all of the good work and technology from the people across the company. So we build on their infrastructure, meta's ad system, we use meta's safety technologies. But then try to also carve out our own space, right? We're more focused on creative expression, particularly visual creative. You know, threads, which we also work on, is more focused on ideas and perspectives. Facebook is more of a social marketplace for all things. So we try to make sure that we are cognizant of the rest of the company when there are ways for us to contribute back that we do,

but that we don't lose sight of what our own identity is. So in 2022, I tweeted about how there should be an iPad app for Instagram. And you may remember this because you're applied to this. I do remember. And I remember reading that reply. I remember reading that reply. I don't know if I have it exactly in front of me, but it was clearly not a priority at the time. It was not. There is one now.

There is. What changed? So, I mean, a couple different things. One is, in general, we always wanted to build one, but it wasn't the next most valuable thing we thought we could do with our time. Two is, I think that we saw an opportunity to try and lean into where we think Instagram is going over time. So, you know, more and more of Instagram time spent is watching short videos, watching reels. People, they're actually pretty social. People send reels to their friends all the time and start conversations.

That's where the iPad up starts now. Yeah. So the idea was in a world where messaging and reels are driving our growth, how could we reorient the app more around those concepts? And then if you look at how people consume video, it's usually they consume. they consume video less times per day than other things, but for longer each time. So less sessions a day, longer duration per session.

And that's also the shape of tablet usage. People use tablets less times per day, but longer per time than their phone, for instance. So we thought it would also be an interesting opportunity to try a Reel's first version of the app without all of the challenges that come along with moving people from one version the experience to another.

I kind of wonder if that was it, because they've tested a Reels first version of the app in some other places, but this was a new version of the app. So it's not like people on the iPad are switching from feed to Reels. Yeah. I'm switching from, if you had it, like the tiny little mobile sad version. On up phone version. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And it's interesting also that, you know, I was asking for an app, for an iPad, and I wonder how much you listen to user feedback about what they hope to see in Instagram. or what they wish would come back from old Instagram or whatever it is. As a creator, I do with this all the time. I have to have a filter for like, okay, I know people will always want the old thing. But I have to have a balance of moving forward as well,

like you talked about. Do you listen to or factor in a lot of user, like verbal feedback? Like, Adam, bring back this. Adam, stop doing this. Are you listening to that at all? For sure. I mean, I get into my comments.

I get into my DMs. I get into that requests folder on a weekly basis. And I try to find the signal. and try to not get overly focused on the noise but I also try to understand what's the root thing someone's asking for so sometimes you're asking for a specific feature but there's like a thing that Instagram isn't as good at that it used to be at a lower level

and then where I can where we can meet that need in some other way without inventing it a new thing or going backwards we try and do that but I do think it's also just true that what works changes I mean, I actually curious for you, because I've even been experiencing this, because I actually post on Instagram, you know, so I get a little bit of empathy for what it's like to try to be successful on the platform. Okay. I actually had my followers start to decline like a year and a half ago. And I was like, okay, I got to rethink. Remember the investigation.

Yeah, yeah. But so for you, like, have you found that certain things, sure, people are asking for, you know, the version from a couple years ago. But have you found that certain constructs or series you do, stop? working and you needed to reinvent them? I think in the past a little bit more. I think now the priority for me has been to abandon something before it trickles out and dies. So we have series that we do. We have like almost recurring videos every year.

You know I'm going to unbox the new iPhone and review the new iPhone. At some point, eventually we're going to move on from that type of video, and I want to be ahead of that rather than behind it. Yeah. So getting out before it gets to grades. Before you get canceled for not having, you know, the things people are looking forward to. But it is interesting. And I also think, yeah, there is some amount of noise where, you know, I hear people in the comments asking for certain things,

but I have to sort of interpret, read between the lines and understand what they really want is something more fundamental. What's the new Instagram iPad app now? What's the new most commonly asked for feature that is simply not a priority right now? Ooh, that's a really good question. So the most requests I get aren't for new features. They're like, verify me. It's my birthday, is my favorite version of that. It's my birthday.

All for my birthday is a blue check mark. Interesting. Okay. I get that a lot. A lot of people who disagree with content decisions, some content was taken down, and they feel like they're censored. We want to make sure that we provide recourse there.

What's a feature that's asked for for that? That's not a priority right now. I know a lot of, I see a lot of people saying prioritize photos again. Yeah. And I just feel like obviously that's where Instagram came from. Yeah. But it may feel like it's going backwards. There's a lot of photos first creators who feel like they're being left behind by focusing on reels a lot.

But we've tried, particularly with carousels and being able to add music to photos and music to carousels, to give people who don't want to make reels a way to still create content that's going to be engaging. We're not trying to push video because we have some interest in video. Actually, video in a lot of ways is not great for our business. If you watch one video, you probably could have seen a few different photos. So the number of ads you're going to see per hour is going to go down. So we call that monetization efficiency. So the reason why we're leading the video is not because it's, you know, we have some, like, thing for video. It's because that's what's driving engagement.

That's what's driving, pulling people away from Instagram to other video platforms. And if we want to say relevant, we need to do that. So the question with photos is not everyone's going to be able to make videos. Making videos isn't easy. You probably know that better than anyone. How can we make, well, how can we make making videos easier, but also how can we make photos more engaging so that they can compete in a video first world?

But most of the features are like much smaller. They're like just weird broken things that drive me nuts. Like if I add you to a collection, we can have shared collections now, and it goes into the DMs every time I save something. I can't retroactively add more people, you know, to that collection. There's lots of little things like that that drive me to like that that drive me nuts.

Sure. And so I'm constantly trying to get those things. So that I thought up was the big whale. Now it's just a little stuff. That was the big whale. I mean, there's other ones like, you know, people ask to go back to chrono feed. We have a chrono feed. You can get there.

We're not going to make it the default. So maybe that's maybe the most requested. But that's actually a very loud but relatively small percentage of people. But that one is, I do get a lot too. But that one, I think we've sort of found the balance there. But people ask for more power. They ask for a lot of power features. Like, I want to be able to not see any photos from my high school friends above their kids.

And it's like, okay. Well, it's just interesting to say that because there's this new feature that you've started talking about that I just got access to you 25 minutes ago. Oh, really? I haven't really fully dived in yet, but I would love to hear you explain it because giving users control is a very risky thing to do. It is. And many don't even pretend to want to do it. Yeah. But there's a new feature where you'll be able, there's no name yet.

You tune your algorithm, essentially. Explain what it is, first of all, and then why you figure this is something you wanted to try to do. Yeah, so this was a meme on threads about two years ago, almost now, called Dear Algorithm, and people who just wrote these letters asking for things that were very sort of bespoke, like that example from before. And it was, but it's clear that, you know, people want more control over the experience. And I think that makes sense. and a world where more and more of not

I mean look the primary way people actually share on Instagram is not even through feed or stories it's through DMs so the connecting site is really healthy on the direct messages but in terms of what they consume more and more of it is recommendations content from accounts that you do not yet follow

particularly reals and so in that world where following still matters but matters less than it used to how can we give you more control over the experience and so we took a look at that meme and then we took a look at some of the new opportunities that some new technologies and AI allow. And we created a way for you to actually see what we think

that you're interested in. I saw that. I got that far. Yeah, you got that far. So I hit the button and I saw the eight or nine top topics that I think I'm interested in. Yeah, it's not comprehensive. It's the top ones. Okay. That's funny because the number one one is like the model name of a car that I've been looking at for years,

which makes perfect sense. So I shouldn't be shocked that it knows that about me. But it's funny that it's gotten that just from essentially how I've engaged with content that's been recommended to me. Yes. Okay.

And then you can add topics because maybe you're into something that we don't know you're into. And then you can add things that you would not like to see. So you could just be like, I'm not interested in American football or I'm interested in politics,

whatever happens to be. The thing that it doesn't support yet that I'm really excited about is the ability to see something that we think you're into and for you to override us. So, for instance, you could be like, you know, I don't know, maybe you're all into March Madness and then your team lost in the first round. And you're just like, I really don't want to be pummeled with March Madness for the next four weeks.

Sure. So you can pop it out. There's lots of examples like that where we might misinterpret a signal that you're interested in. and it might be more that it's like upsetting you or that it was interesting to you a week ago but isn't now. Or I was hate watching it and I really just wish it would stop showing up so I could stop hate watching.

Hate watching is a thing. This isn't hate watching, but I have a friend who got stuck in this place where she saw, it was constantly getting like videos of like animals and like tough situations. It's like kind of sad and like rescues and like sometimes you don't know if they get rescued or not. Yeah.

It's kind of sad. Yeah. And she couldn't help. Yeah. And so. Like doom scrolling. Yeah. Yeah, so actually for her, because this was a couple of years ago,

I was like, look, you can just do a full reset. I don't recommend it, but for everybody, because it's a big deal, but you can just be like forget everything, hard reset. That's a button, like an algorithmic forget I said anything type button. Yeah, it exists. Okay. But this might be a nicer way to do that because maybe she doesn't want to have an Instagram that is much less interesting.

She just wants to get rid of pets. Interesting. What is the riskiest thing about this? Because I imagine, I mean, there's TikTok. they've never even pretended to want. I mean, I guess at the beginning, when I sign up, they're like, give us your basic interest, and that's kind of the end of that.

YouTube, there's categories I can click on, but my algorithm is just doing its thing, and I can feel it's shifting when I watch a little bit more podcast stuff or when I watch a little bit more car review stuff. What is the risky thing in your head about giving users these controls over their recommended stuff? Two big things.

One, we might mess up, right? So, like, we won't deliver. You'll not get as much of the thing you ask for, or you'll say you don't want something and you'll still get it, at which point you're going to rightfully point your finger at us. And that will happen, right? We do make mistakes, particularly at scale. And the other is that it'll be less efficient at, you know, driving engagement

and driving the business, right? Like showing you what you ask for might mean you use Instagram less than showing you what you tend to interact with more. Or it might be, there's a bunch of ways in which it can get more. or just spending time on making sure that's working is an opportunity cost and we could spend that time elsewhere making Instagram better in some other way.

So those are very real. But I think we're going to a world where this is possible at a level of execution that it wasn't before, particularly because on the back end, if you look at how ranking is evolved over the last five or plus years, a lot of the most advanced techniques have become less and less human interpretable.

So we're looking at these things where we take videos and we map, them into this space that we call an embedding and all these things are these giant vectors. And we can't even describe why these seven videos are near each other. They just happen to be because of behavior. Yeah. But then it turns out with some of these new models, we can be like, oh, that's, you know, in your case, you know, a specific type of car.

And so we can, so that allows us to do things like not, be like, hey, are you into sports? But you can be like, no, I'm into, you know, I'm an Arsenal fan. I want to see, like, the invincibles on re-highlights, you know, vintage, you know, goals. And we can go out and try and get that for you. Interesting. And also, I wanted to ask if you'd ever heard of this extremely discreet theory about crustacean evolution? No, but I've heard about how it seems like there's a bunch of crustaceans that are all evolving into lobsters or crabs specifically, because it seems. to be the ideal form for living under you know super high pressure cold water

no but I'm into this so it's interesting because I like analogies and I like to take that and look at it in other lenses yeah and sometimes it feels like products do that yes where they're all competing with each other and trying to get better and they're eventually just becoming the same thing yes whether or not it's the ideal thing yeah is there a possibility that social networks are doing this where you are running Instagram. And in order to compete, as I've heard you say, you're adopting, you know, people are obviously engaging with videos, reels, things like that. So we're going to do more of that, maybe potentially losing the core of the photos and the things that came beforehand that

brought people to Instagram. Yeah. Is it possible that the competition is all sort of getting at the same thing in a way? Yeah, I think you can make that argument for sure. You're all sort of regressing to the mean. I mean, I think, so in some ways, like we're trying to do certain things differently. So we're trying to do Reels differently by making them more social, more friendly. You know, things like that, Friends Feed inside of the Reels tab where you can see what your friends have interacted with, leaning more in re-shares, etc. But it's also true that if you take a big step back and you look at all of social media, not only have the apps become more and more similar, the rate of convergence has increased. So you look at, you know, like when did each

app introduce ranking? And there was like many years between the first app and the last app. One did each app introduce stories? There was a few years. I mean, it was popularized by Snapchat. It was invented by cacao stories in Korea. But then like every, you know, Pinterest, even YouTube X. LinkedIn. Everybody. It's everywhere. Yeah. That was faster. When did we all start leaning into mobile first video, you know, TikTok style, real style, YouTube short style? That happened faster. Recommendations faster. So I think that the competition is. fierce and as a result there is a very real pressure to borrow and steal ideas from the competition that works but you also have to figure out how do you also stay true to your own

identity and how do you differentiate because if we're all the same then you can just switch apps and it doesn't cost you anything and I guess is there a pressure to well there is a pressure to evolve the feature into your own thing but do you feel like leaving behind some of the things like chronological feed or just a ton of photos everywhere. Do you feel like there's a risk to that? Or is it just sort of smaller numbers to the point where it doesn't have to matter as much? So there's definitely a risk. My hope is that the core ideas are the same if the how is different.

So you're still connecting with friends. You're still exploring your interests. You're still expressing your creativity if you want to. But how is changing. But yeah, there's definitely risk. And there will always be people who are going to be upset and who are going to want us to move back. And look, I feel that way too sometimes. But I think the alternative is to just to become irrelevant.

Because I don't think you can just not evolve and hope to continue to grow or even maintain your scale. I think you're going to see people. We do. We see people when we don't evolve fast enough, leave us for the competition. I'll give you an example. We look all the time, pick a team. the ranking team, the video creation team, whatever. We look at two things.

We look at the top line. How is the trend doing? Are people, you know, sharing more on Instagram? And then we look at a back test. So all the changes we make in the six-month window, we will hold out or not launched to 1% of people. And so you can see what is the value that the team is creating. And then you can also see what the overlying app trend is.

So I'll make up numbers. Let's say we increased how much people are sharing photos and videos by 5%. but the overall amount of photos according to the back test but the overall photos and videos shared on Instagram per person per day was totally flat that means there's a 5% headwind that means if you don't do anything

you're losing 5% every six months we see that across a lot of different key metrics which is just a signal of either people moving on or more likely just the competition getting stronger and so if we don't evolve you're just going to see us shrink

and then that spirals There's less people using Instagram. There's less reach to go around. Creators start leaving. Less people then use Instagram. There's less reach to go around still. And you're in a negative feedback cycle. Interesting.

The bottom line for the company matters, of course. Obviously, you want to keep the core values of the product, but also you need to still be a business. For sure. How do creators make money on Instagram today? Primarily through branded content deals and also increasingly through what we call partner. but there's at a high level three ways to make money on all platforms you can either get paid by a brand or a company you can get paid by the platform directly youtube is best at that or you can get paid by your fans users and we have things like subscriptions and tipping yeah but they're smaller scale one thing that's interesting in terms of getting paid by companies historically it's been primarily brands doing branded advertising and that's great but there's

There's a lot of money in advertising that isn't brand dollars, it's what we call direct response. So trying to sell a specific chair or watch or whatever. What partner ads do is allow creators to create content and then opt in to letting brands use that creative as ads, which then benefits from the entire measurement system of our ads system, which is very good for direct response advertisers, which then increases the pool of dollars for potential dollars for creators to make by allowing them not only to do off-platform brand deals with big brand awareness campaigns, but also deals with direct

response, which is a whole, which is a massive, actually the majority of our business. Yeah. I'm interested in the breakdown of that because I think when I first started as a creator, actually when I first started, none of them were really a thing. Yeah. But especially on YouTube, for example, made lots of videos, made no money, and then the first version of this was revenue sharing with the platform. Yeah.

And the first checks were extremely small, but it was just the easiest bottom way to get like a foot in the door to start to see some revenue from the work that you do. And then it felt like you graduated to the point where you were able to work with a brand on something. What is the breakdown like on Instagram? Is it mostly people working with outside companies and then putting their stuff on Instagram? Yeah, so Facebook has a meaningful revshare business. Instagram doesn't. We've been working on it for years now, and we haven't been able to make it sustainable. And I can go into the details there on what I think sustainable looks like.

It just has to break even. We can't just be burning money. Like you said, we are a business. But the vast majority, you know, it's easily north of $10 billion a year, probably a lot more. This is a couple years old at that data point, is through off-platform deals that creators make directly between them and brands. And then they use their reach on Instagram to. monetize that way. And now what we've seen is we've been able to scale up partner ads, these direct response ads to a really meaningful scale, which we hope is just increasing the

overall pie. We still have subscriptions, we still have tipping, we're still working on what we call bonuses or performance-based payouts, the sort of rev-share, but they are much smaller in scale. Yeah. So how do you grow that rev-share piece? Because I think a lot of creators think about that and would love it to be more but as you say it's not as sustainable what are the what are the major things keeping it from being sustainable so there's three things i think that the that the program needs to be to make sense um to scale up one is the it just needs to not burn money um so what the theory here is that you pay creators they create more content then you have more advertising and then you can make back what you pay creators um i don't need to make money off

If it's even close to break-even or break-even, that seems like a great thing to do. Two, the criteria for being eligible needs to be transparent. It can't be some algorithm, and you're in and I'm not, and we have no idea why. It has to be like, all right, you need to hit, might not be like automatic. It might be like you need to average a million views a week or whatever it is.

But there needs to be some transparent eligibility. There's just be a page that explains it. Exactly. Yeah. But we need to get the program to be break-even without using algorithmic ways. of identifying creators so that you can just actually explain why you are not eligible. And then three of the checks just can't be embarrassing. Like if I sent you a $4 check, you'd be like, thanks, but now I'm kind of offended.

That doesn't have to be that high. It just has to be something that's like, I don't want to be sending a bunch of creators pennies. I just think that'll just be a bad look. It's interesting you say that. I heard you say that on Colin Samir, and I actually disagree. I think... You'd rather get pennies? I would rather get pennies.

And it's not really me specifically, but I think as budding creators, because again, it's hard to go off platform and get good at brand deal and manage the inbox and negotiate and do all that. And so to just have like a base way of having like splitting revenue with the platform, even if my first YouTube check was $1.74, like that was motivating in a way for me to see, okay, if I can scale my reach, if I can focus my efforts on certain things, then I know that I can increase what I'm making. And obviously it's not going to be a full-time massive chunk of the business for every creator, but I think I'd rather get $4 than $0 if I know that there's a reason I can move it to $10. I might be overreacting to angry DMs I get from people who are in the program

who are like, you make X billion dollars a year, you send me a check for $9. Yeah. It's maybe because it's hard to explain exactly how you arrive at the number. Because I know on YouTube, you can very easily determine what ad came from what video and how it's associated with the uploader. Maybe that's harder on Instagram, so it's harder to explain. The attribution is tougher yet.

Yeah. But look, if I'm over—I would love to drop one of the criteria to make it more possible. That's not the gate right now. The first two are. But, you know, we might get there. Maybe we'll get there in some countries and not other countries. but I could very well be over-rotated on that piece of feedback I'm always trying like we said how do you sift through the signal and the noise

there's a lot of strong opinions about what we do particularly from people who rely on us and I get that and so I'm always trying to figure out when am I just being when am I really focused on what's best overall and when I might be overreacting to not being not maybe liking getting yelled at and this might be an example of the latter yeah just I went out again the arc on other social networks, especially with YouTube that I came up on. So that's why I referenced that a lot. It's like when I was first starting, sure, the $1 check didn't

meaningfully make a difference to me, but it was motivating. And then eventually it was the biggest part of the business. And then when I was able to get the skills to go out and sell to others who wanted to like work with me on ads and manage the inbox and all that, that became the next biggest chunk. And then the revenue share with the platform became secondary. And it's always going to fluctuate. I don't think any smart business depends entirely on the revenue share of the platform.

But it does represent motivation and a nice bar to continue to see if it goes up or down. You can kind of associate that with the performance of the entire channel. So I feel like it is something that most, I think you're getting a vocal minority being very angry, but I think most people would be happier to see something than nothing.

Yeah, I mean, it's it's a compelling argument. You're giving me something legitimate to think about, which I think it would not be surprising to me if I was overreacting to a vocal minority. I'm always trying not to, but

it's hard. And so just pattern matching in general the kinds of mistakes we make, that's a common pattern, so you're probably right. Support for this episode comes from Masta Chips. You know, sometimes the best snacks are the ones that have felt like they've been around forever. Simple, straightforward, they're done right.

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. How often do Instagram ads get you to buy stuff? More often now than they used to. They do, they get you? They get me sometimes. I always thought, like, I never get got by my own ads, obviously, but they still get you. They get me sometimes, because sometimes it's something I didn't know about.

It's like very, it means perfect. It's like, I'm a dad, I'm in my 40s, I live in San Francisco. I like gadgets, so they're like, you know, they're like growing, like, they go after me with the things that they're pretty good. I mean, what do I like, what have they got me with? Coffee gear. I really like gear. That's a popular one. I really like coffee.

I got deep into pour over for a couple years. I got deep into espresso for a couple years. So, you know, a little tiny coffee. grind, vacuum that's perfectly designed to, like, fit into your setup. They say just the right thing, just the right pictures. Yeah, I know. I was like, oh. My wife always jokes.

She, I, we, once a year, usually have the argument about whether or not Instagram is listening to your microphone. She sometimes doubts my position on that. Yeah. It seems like the ads get really good sometimes. They do. They do. They do. Just for the record.

They're not. We're not. For a couple reasons. Okay. Hold on. Yeah, I should be careful. So you might have been looking for it online because we do work with advertisers who send us data

about what people were looking on their website. They want to target those people, so you might be looking for, like we were talking about, a camera lens and then get that lens. You might have been talking about it with a friend and they might have been looking at it online. That's the one that seems to be the creepiest, but is actually real.

Yeah. Where that person's getting ads for it. that person bought it, I talked to them about it. And is it proximity or is it just like my relationship with their account? It'll most likely happen if you two are similar on paper. So it's like two guys in tech roughly the same age. It's like that kind of thing. And then sometimes it's just people don't realize they actually saw the ad. Because you scroll by them and sometimes that registers subconsciously and then you're talking about that area. That's kind of how advertising works.

Those are the three minutes. But here's the other thing. No one believes me. But the other thing is, if we were listening to your mic, your battery would drain real fast. Sure. If the phone was remotely competent, you'd be seeing a little light saying that the thing was on. And it would just be a gross violation of FIREMC.

Most importantly. Yeah. So like, we don't. But I do have this conversation once in a while. Funny. Okay, so what does the future of Instagram look like? because there is this evolution happening in social networks, and obviously you've seen coming from the Instagram of old to what it is today.

What is Instagram in, and I love asking you this because CEOs hate talking about future products, but I'm going to ask you anyway. What is Instagram in five years, 10 years? Is it very different? Yeah. Is it still keeping the core of what it is now? So I think there's a period of time that's more clear, and there's a period of time where it gets a lot less clear.

That's always true. The further on the future, the less greening there you have. But there's a little bit of like a threshold. So over the next couple years, I think the biggest thing that's going to really change our business is going to be AI. I think you're going to see a lot of great things where you're going to see more creators can create more content.

So you can create more content or better content if you're already a creator or people who didn't have the ability to make content, can make compelling content who couldn't use to before. But there's also lots of concerns, right? There's also deep fakes, how do you know what to trust, How do you know that something was actually captured with a camera? You won't be able to.

So there's opportunities and challenges that come along with more and more content that is created with AI. We too often talk about AI as binary. It's either synthetic or real content. And the truth is... AI assisted in the middle. It's going to be mostly that, is my guess. So I think that's going to change what content you see on Instagram, who you follow on Instagram, who you even talk to on Instagram.

These things are going to change. and there's going to be a lot in the blurry middle. We focus mostly on the extremes, go back to the way of old or don't talk to like the unsupervised AI bot, but I think most of it's going to be in between those two. Where things get much more fuzzy is when the form factor changes. We obviously have been very public about the fact that we believe that eventually phones will still be part of our lives,

but not nearly as dominant. One example of how it could turn out is how, you know, desktop and laptops have. have turned out, which is, you know, you have more than one, probably. You know, it's still an important part of your life. My computer's an important part of my life, but it's not the most important. In a world where, you know, wearables, but particularly glasses, I think, get better and better more in, you know, the five to ten years.

And obviously, we've talked about this publicly with MetaMirmede displays and with Orion. I think that that makes it much less clear what Instagram is. Yeah. Because there's certain things that naturally flow, like most of what you do in terms of connecting with France's message, you can imagine that. Yeah. You can capture photos. But then what does a consumption experience look like in a Glass's First World is, I mean,

I've got a couple educated guesses, but I think it's going to evolve a lot. Does any of it worry you? Because I made a reference at the end. I got to see the Meta Ray Band displays, and I made a reference at the end of my video to like, you know, there is an instrument. Instagram app on those glasses, and there is a actual real possibility that I could be talking to someone wearing the glasses, and they could just be scrolling through Instagram and not paying attention to me, looking through glass at me.

That's pretty close to that Wally meme. Like, that's extremely dystopian. Oh, yeah, yeah, with the slurpees? Yeah, so, like, is that, I mean, it's possible now that I could actually happen. What do you think about that? I'm a warrior by nature, so I worry about all of the things. There's, like, how can it get misused? how it could be bad for people.

There's also how it could be bad for the business, how it could be bad for us. I mean, the thing that we've maybe talked about a little bit less publicly in the context of AI and new technology is like, yes, it's changing what our apps are and what people do on our apps. It's also massively changing how we build our apps.

We're trying to wrestle with it even internally as well. So I think it's important for us to be honest about the risks and the downsides and then try to do what we can to maximize the upsides and minimize those downsides. So, yeah, I worry about it. I've got kids. What is their life going to be?

I mean, so when I was 13, I'm 42, I was born in 83. When I was 13, it's mid-90s. This is like AOL dial-up, 2,400 BPS. Early internet. Yeah, like, mm-hmm. Can't be on the phone. Yeah, so look, my parents had no idea what I was doing online. And I think one of the risks for me as a dad,

My kids are too young to use social media, but they're 9, 7, and 5. They're going to come up as a lot of this tech comes up. And it's going to be hard for me to even understand, possibly, what the risks are if I'm not proactively leaning in. So, yeah, I think about, I'm excited about all the positive opportunities, and I am concerned about all of the risks, and I try to think about both. It's an interesting position because as a social network with, now it's three. billion monthly active users it's a hard number to wrap it's my head around you become kind of like fabric of society type big like decisions that you make to get people to use instagram more get humanity to be on their phones more like that's the type of repercussions that come with

what's happening at instagram you know which is interesting so i i actually wonder what you think of you've seen these ai creators like creators on instagram that are entirely ai fully yeah and there's two kinds. Well, right. And I'm talking about the ones that are completely independently AI. But not just independent I, it's a persona. It's a person who doesn't exist. Right, right, yeah. Because there's also like if I'm not AI who's like fully synthetic content, but they're creating these dreams games. Just random all types of stuff. Yeah. I mean, there's like a creator with a name and a face. Yeah. Yeah. And they make tons of stuff for no effort. I figure that's good for Instagram in theory because it's very efficient. It's a creator that doesn't demand a ton of revenue,

but like creates tons of engaging content. Yeah. But on, the other side, as a human creator, it's horrible. I hate seeing that. What do you think when you see AI creator doing what human creators do? Both. So, I mean, so on one hand, I think that in a world where anybody can like make any type of video with like, I don't know, $150 worth of AI credits, whether it's personifying a person that doesn't exist or anything else, Like, what do we have left as creatives? And I think it's really our taste and our understanding of culture and our own creativity. And so I'm in some ways bullish on those ideas, that creatives will always have taste, have creativity, and have a position on culture.

And therefore, whether or not the content was created with AI, without AI, or entirely with AI, they will be telling stories, pushing boundaries, driving culture, and that'll be good. But I also worry about, and it's also great if there's people who, you know, maybe you just were never comfortable in front of a camera. And now you can do it. But then I also worry about deep fakes. I worry about just an explosion of competition. If there's 10, 100 times as much content, there's no way there's going to be 10 or 100 times more engagement. So the average reach is going to go down.

will probably get blamed for that. What does that mean for people who, yes, it's great who people who couldn't create contact before cannot create contact, but for people who aren't, don't have access to or aren't technical enough to leverage this technology, how to make sure that they still have a voice. Yeah.

So my mind ping-pongs between the exciting opportunities and the scary risks. Yeah. Does it make sense to create rules around it? Like, you want to enable, obviously you want to raise the floor and make it more accessible for people to, create but I don't think this is me being biased as a human creator I don't think we want Instagram to be full of AI only creators and there are some that are getting tons of engagement

very successful profiles yeah but I don't love the world where Instagram is full of that yeah is it up to the rules of Instagram to prevent that from happening or if they just make good enough stuff is that that's just the way it's going to be it could be I mean I have a really hard time imagining it getting to a place where, like, that's all that there is, because I just don't see how that content is going to cover enough culturally relevant content. You believe in humanity a lot. I think people are interesting. And, like, and look, AI will be interesting over time, but right now, like, there's a

reason, I mean, on one hand, like, it's unbelievable what some of this tech can do. Like, you know, for instance, I was living in the UK for a while, one common thing for banks to do is voice signatures to like sign in like you should definitely not do that anymore way too easy as someone who has thousands of hours of my voice in high definition on the internet yeah don't do that don't do that yeah um on the other hand like i haven't found a funny AI yet i haven't found an AI that has um said something that i thought was like on the bleeding edge of what's interesting in culture right now um and that will happen um but i think that's further away i think we're right now, people, particularly creatives, bring something to the table that AI does not,

even though AI can completely, particularly with direction, fabricate something that didn't exist. Yeah. I think to an extent, some of it is interesting now because it's AI, which may be why some of it is blowing up. But I think the other reason so many people call it slop is because it kind of just appeals to the lowest common denominator. We're sitting here thinking, okay, we've never seen anything really.

interesting or creative or funny. I've never really thought that hard about something AI. But at the very lowest level of just like basic humor, basic, interesting imagery, they're making that stuff now. Yeah. So that's... But the thing about that from an Instagram business perspective is that it's not... It's not that valuable.

So, like, for... It's too commoditized. You'll be able to find that anywhere. So for us, sure, it might be nice for some of the content on Instagram to be content that you could find elsewhere and drive some engagement. But it's fundamentally not differentiated, it's not defensible, it leaves us exposed. If we become all content that you can find anywhere else, then it's very easy for you to leave us. Whereas if there's content that is more unique or differentiated, then I think that it's much more valuable beyond the amount of engagement in my drive or how I'm on a revenue in my drive. or how I'm on a revenue it might drive.

That's one of the reasons why we focus on creators. The creators do post across multiple platforms more and more so, but it is fundamentally more differentiated than like sports highlights or AI slot, for instance. Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, it sounds like there's at least some incentive for Instagram to keep humans on the site happy and create stuff. I mean, look, there's different forces in different directions at play.

it's just like most big questions not black and white not simple yeah well I guess then I have one more question for you yeah which is the same question from the beginning you know Instagram 3 billion monthly active users reels upcoming AI you know maybe leaving some features behind evolving forward

what what is Instagram right now 2025 ooh right now it depends a lot on the country but I'm not going to use that as a cop-up but it is wildly different by country I believe that in so maybe we're here in the US in the US I think that

we are there's some strengths and there's some weaknesses I think on the strength side you know I think we are still the de facto home for most creators they use multiple platforms YouTube is better at long form video they're better at RevShare.

TikTok is better at breaking new talent and helping people get discovered. But we are a more complete suite of tools for you to not just tell your stories, but engage with your audience, et cetera. So that's why if you look at how many creators are on Instagram, it seems like they're more than any other platform. We are trying to continue to stay culturally relevant

by investing in originality and timeliness. But there's real risk that the competition will execute better than us. And I don't want to be in charge of Instagram when we drop from being like a tier one app in terms of cultural relevance to a tier two. And to me, that feels kind of existential. I want us to be the best platform for creatives, the best platform for people to talk to their friends about their interests. In some ways, I can point to numbers to suggest that we're the first. In other ways, I can point to numbers suggest that with the second or the third. And so we're, I think, at this really intense, possibly pivotal moment where the world is changing faster than ever, the competition's fiercer than ever.

And we're trying to navigate that and somehow also stay simple and stay true to our identity. Yeah. Sounds like you're a busy man. So let you go. Adam, thanks for the time. Such a pleasure. Appreciate it. Hopefully we get us again. Yeah, it'll be a blast. Thank you.