How Instagram changed our world

How Instagram changed our world

It has start as a photo- sharing platform, but quickly rose to become the most influential app of our genwration.Now, a forensic new book reveals the struggles and eccentricities of the man behind instagram.

How Instagram changed our world

One day in the autumn of 2015, a small but significant change was implemented at the Instagram offices in Menlo Park, California. Employees arrived at work to discover the rubbish bins under each desk had disappeared. The bins had allowed people to work efficiently – no one had to stand up to throw away a coconut water carton or wasabi pea wrapper after they’d enjoyed the company’s free food. But the bins weren’t really Instagram’s – they were installed by Facebook, which had purchased the photo-sharing app for $1bn in 2012.

Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s co-founder, didn’t like the bins. He didn’t like the cardboard boxes employees used to file papers and paraphernalia. He hated old, sagging birthday balloons. Instagram’s offices, he explained, after removing the bins, should represent its ethos. They should be beautiful, simple, pristine – much like the app itself.

Tech reporter Sarah Frier, author of No Filter: The Inside Story of How Instagram Transformed Business, Celebrity and Our Culture, explains this story is significant for three reasons. First, it demonstrates Systrom’s aesthetic sensibilities. Second, it is indicative of his frustration with Facebook. (A year earlier he had torn down motivational posters belonging to the parent company, one of which said: “Done is Better than Perfect.”) And third, while the incident obviously affected Instagram employees – they dubbed it #trashcangate – it also represented an issue facing its users, who were, Frier says, “intimidated about posting because they thought Instagram warranted perfection”.

In the decade since the invention of Instagram, social media has dramatically changed our lives. This pursuit of perfection has led to a rise in filter-inspired plastic surgery and a boom in oversized desserts that don’t fit in your mouth, but fit perfectly into a little square posted online. How did this simple photo-sharing service get 1bn users in eight years? Does Instagram create or reflect our values? And, if the former, shouldn’t we know a little more about the mindset and motivations of the men behind the app?

‘He wants everything to be at a level of quality because he believes in that quality’: Kevin Systrom. Photograph: Matt Edge/The New York Times/Red/eyevine

Frier and I talk on the phone a week before her book is published. No Filter, she says, is an omniscient narration of Instagram’s birth and growth, cobbled together from insiders’ memories. Frier interviewed a different person each day for a year after getting the book deal in 2018. Many spoke without Facebook’s permission, and the majority of her sources remain anonymous. “I realised that there was so much uncharted territory,” she says. “My editor told me a book is ready to be written when you have 100 things in your pocket that nobody else has published.” Frier surpassed this benchmark.

One anecdote recalls Systrom saving actor Ashton Kutcher from a 4am fire in a log cabin. In return, Kutcher helped Instagram grow credibility with celebs. (He hosted a party to introduce Systrom to superstars like Ariana Grande, who the Instagram CEO didn’t recognise.) Then there’s the time the Instagram team celebrated the sale to Facebook with an all-expenses trip to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, where they were greeted with personal congratulatory notes from Ivanka Trump.

But gossip isn’t at the heart of Frier’s book and it’s the mundane stories about Systrom that are most revealing. A Stanford alumnus who, at 25, worked in marketing at Google, he founded his company with software engineer and friend Mike Krieger in 2009. His original idea was a website called Burbn, which showed people where their friends were partying in real time. The name was inspired by Systrom’s love of the whiskey. Throughout the book, Frier reveals his passion for prestige. Systrom enjoys fine drinks and bespoke bicycles – he snubbed Facebook’s free coffee by importing beans that he only used at their “peak point” (four days after roasting).

“I think that products are ultimately a reflection of their leaders,” Frier says. “He wants everything to be at a level of quality because he believes in that quality.” Systrom turned Burbn into Instagram when he realised there was a gap in the market for an app that helped people quickly share pictures from phones. But there was another problem he hoped to solve: back then, phone cameras were shoddy and took unattractive pictures. When Instagram launched, it offered filters that people could use to make their photos – and by extension, their lives – look more appealing.

Zuckerberg used to end every staff meeting by shouting: ‘Domination!’ Photograph: Jessica Chou/The New York Times/eyevine

From the outset, his demand for quality shifted our reality. “A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever,” Frier says. Instagram was heavily curated in its early days. Because there are no mechanisms to go viral on the app (users can’t share posts), Instagram employees manually chose photos to push on its “Popular” page. “Instagram had a hand in it in a way none of us on the outside would ever necessarily realise,” Frier says.

For example, in 2013, one Instagram employee dedicated his time to “discovering pets”. He tracked adorable dogs, birds and lizards in a spreadsheet before highlighting them on the official @instagram page. Frier chronicles how these decisions changed real lives. Courtney Dasher, for example, was a dog owner with a cute-looking pet named Tuna. She quit her job and earned money via Instagram thanks to the decision of that employee. Dasher tells Frier that pictures of her dog helped fans cope with anxiety and depression. “The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected the habits of the 2m people who now follow that dog,” Frier says.

How else have we been influenced by Instagram? Frier’s examples range from how we organise bookshelves by cover colour to how once rarely visited tourist destinations are now trampled underfoot. “By constantly serving users images of visually appealing lives and hobbies,” she says, Instagram forced people to “make their lives more worthy of posting about.” She notes how leisure time became a status symbol – how Instagram gradually affected the economy, as people began to value experiences over things. More of us now “pursue vacations in more picturesque settings,” Frier says, in part because pictures taken in those locations look great on the ’gram. (She links the app with nine major retailers filing for bankruptcy in the US in 2017).

And it’s not just our lives that have to look interesting on Instagram – our faces do, too. Photo-editing apps, like Facetune, have boomed in popularity. Teens slim their noses, enhance their waists and hide their spots with the help of digital editing tools. One plastic surgeon told Frier that his clients now seek impossible-to-achieve adjustments inspired by the app. Kim Kardashian, owner of the seventh most popular Instagram account (and a famously large behind) can arguably be linked to the 20,000 people in the US who had a Brazilian bum lift in 2017.

This isn’t something Systrom actually wanted. Frier says that selfies and bikini shots were against the CEO’s “artistic sensibilities”. These posts became popular despite the fact they were ignored by the official @instagram account. Yet Frier says that Instagram incentivised selfies and surgery through its metrics, if not its values. The choice to display numbers of followers and likes turned the app “into a game one could win”. In 2017 a study by the Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the worst app for teens’ mental health. Was this an inevitable outcome?

Frier starts her final chapter with a quote from an anonymous Instagram executive: “Everything breaks at a billion.” Instagram reached 1bn active monthly users for the first time in June 2018. “I think at a certain point you lose control of something when it gets that big,” she says, noting that 6m accounts on Instagram now have over 1m followers. “They wanted to build a better community, but they just didn’t have the resources to do that, which is such a silly thing to say about a product that is part of a gigantic, well-sourced company, like Facebook.”

Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram in April 2012, when the app had just 13 employees and hadn’t made a single penny in profit. Zuckerberg declined to be interviewed for Frier’s book, sending over a single emailed quote via a PR person. “It’s simple,” he wrote, when asked why he both purchased Instagram and committed to keeping the company independent, “it was a great service and we wanted to help it grow.” Despite the fact he refused to take part in Frier’s reporting, No Filter is as much about Zuckerberg and Facebook as it is about Systrom and Instagram. (The word “Facebook” appears 1,179 times in the book, while “Instagram” appears 1,673.)

“A lot of times we think when a company has been acquired that their business story is over,” Frier says. She argues this isn’t the case here. The book chronicles the power struggles between Systrom and Zuckerberg. Frier believes Zuckerberg acquired Instagram due to his paranoia about competition. Consequently, Zuckerberg occasionally held Instagram back – after it reached 1bn users, the Facebook founder deleted a feature that automatically linked Facebook users to their friends’ Instagram pages. He also prevented the company from hiring more staff and prioritised Facebook’s content moderation over Instagram’s. Ineffective moderation allowed troubling practices – such as the sale of opioids and the proliferation of self-harm – to flourish on Instagram.

For every banal coffee bean anecdote about Systrom, there is a story that makes Zuckerberg look equally weird. In 2012, on the night the Instagram deal was finalised, the Facebook founder’s sheepdog, Beast, bit the leg of Facebook deals director Amin Zoufonoun. He later joked that Zuckerberg showed more concern for the dog than the man. On a separate occasion, Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a teenager on a corporate jet and “was so frustrated he built a computer program to find him all the word options for his letters”. He ended every staff meeting by shouting: “Domination!”

Both men have had a profound impact on our lives and yet when we criticise Instagram, we often criticise women. Articles condemning beautiful influencers for earning millions on Instagram are viral fodder. “Those stories take the airwaves and we don’t think, ‘How did we end up valuing this?’” Frier says. Though influencers are often denounced for not disclosing when they’ve been paid to promote a product, Frier traces this issue back to Systrom. The founder was so dedicated to keeping Instagram aesthetically pleasing that he didn’t want ads on the app to look like ads. (Once he even edited a brand’s picture of French fries so they looked less soggy.)

While we’re busy criticising influencers, Instagram has also avoided scrutiny in other ways. Zuckerberg was called before Congress in 2018 to answer questions about how Facebook allowed user data to be processed by the political firm Cambridge Analytica. Much was made of Facebook’s role in helping Donald Trump win the 2016 presidential election after Russian troll farms targeted divisive ads at Americans. And yet, six months after Zuckerberg’s hearing, a Senate research group discovered that Russian ads had actually received more likes and comments on Instagram than Facebook. “The media spent a day writing about it, and then moved on,” Frier says.

It’s easy (and perhaps enjoyable) to think that bikini shots and Brazilian bum lifts are Instagram’s biggest impact on society – the reality is more complex. Because Zuckerberg allowed Instagram to maintain its independence, the app isn’t tainted by Facebook’s scandals. Yet ultimately, Zuckerberg still owns it – Systrom stepped down as CEO in 2018, partly because of contrasting values, partly because he wanted to return to his “creative roots”. Now, one man controls Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, a global network of 2.5bn users.

What next for Instagram? Frier says the site will continue to face moderation issues as Facebook is prioritised. She also believes advertising on Instagram will increase as Zuckerberg seeks a return on his investment. Frier also notes that the current coronavirus crisis may change the app. While some influencers are seeing their businesses crumble, others are becoming more creative by releasing books, video tutorials, workout classes and even their own filters. These changes might stick once lockdown is over.

But is this really revolutionary? “People still know the way to win at Instagram is to do something visually arresting,” Frier says. “I don’t think that’s going to go away.” From the moment Instagram introduced us to reality-adjusting filters, it changed the way we presented ourselves to the world. A striking observation in No Filter is that Instagram wanted to build a community that valued art and creativity. Instead, “they built a mall”. While much is made of beautiful influencers flogging diet pills and luxury travel on the app, everyone on Instagram is selling their life in some way.

Making money from Instagram livestreams, inside the invite-only app Community, and social-media guidelines for brands during a health crisis

Making money from Instagram livestreams.

Olivia Reaney/Business Insider

Welcome back to this week's Influencer Dashboard newsletter!

This is Amanda Perelli, writing to you from home, and here's an update on what's new in the business of influencers and creators.

This week, my colleague Dan Whateley dove into the world of sponsored livestreaming, particularly on Instagram. 

"A ton of people are going live right now," said Elena Taber, a lifestyle influencer with 108,000 Instagram followers. "I've done it once or twice on my own channel, and then I teamed up with a company to do one on their platform as well."

Taber appeared in a sponsored 30-minute Instagram Live for the fragrance brand Atelier Cologne in early April. The company asked her to share "Work from Home Tips" to its 135,000 followers as part of the brand's live content slate during the week of April 6.

For brands navigating a new at-home consumer environment during the coronavirus pandemic, livestreams can serve as a prime channel for product placements and an opportunity to draw an influencer's audience over to its own social-media accounts.

Creators with an average of 30,000 social-media followers charge around $400 for a sponsored livestream that lasts 30 minutes or less, according to the influencer-marketing platform Mavrck.

But some brands are hesitant to dip their toes into the harder-to-moderate live format, as they're not able to control an influencer's content when it's posted live. (Read the full post here.)

You can read most of the articles here by subscribing to BI Prime. And if this is your first time reading Influencer Dashboard, subscribe to the newsletter here.

Katie Jo Myers recently worked on a paid partnership with the outdoor recreation gear company, Backcountry. Mediakix

As the coronavirus pandemic has continued, brands have adjusted their messaging on social media, and have begun establishing new ways of engaging with influencers in an effort to avoid appearing insensitive.

Mediakix, an influencer-marketing agency that connects brand with influencers, recently published a report advising brands on how to use social media.

I broke down the five key takeaways from the report, which outlines what audiences are saying, how brands can still leverage influencers while at home, and best practices to follow when running a social-media campaign. 

One of the takeaways from the report is that brands should consider asking influencers to pre-promote a livestream event on their own page to ensure a larger audience attendance and overall engagement. This allows influencers to keep audiences engaged by interacting with fans through a live Q&A, Mediakix says.

The agency also advises removing direct response call to actions, such as "swipe up to buy," as they could come across as tone deaf.

Read the full post on how brands can run social-media marketing during a crisis here.

Influencer Joshua Weissman is a beta user of the text-marketing platform Community. Joshua Weissman.

The text-marketing startup Community has raised tens of millions of dollars from investors like Ashton Kutcher to build an app where celebrities and influencers can send texts directly to their fans. 

Dan spoke to influencers testing out Community's app to learn more about the platform. Community's app remains invite-only, and the company is sharing very little publicly about how its product works. 

"I've only been promoting it a little bit, and I've got around 10,000 people on my text platform," said Joshua Weissman, a food creator with 1.7 million subscribers on YouTube. "I sent out a text message and it went out to 9,900 [people]. It had a 98% open rate."

Weissman told Dan that he would compare Community to Mailchimp, but the text version.

While it's still early days for the app, Community could eventually become a staple marketing tool for digital creators looking to reach their fans off of social media.

Read more on about how influencers use Community, here. 

Influencer Keiko Lynn recently hosted a "virtual tea party" for her followers on Instagram Live. Keiko Lynn

Instagram influencers have been leaning into the app's "Live" and "Stories" features in recent weeks as many of their followers spend more time on social media.

As part of its study of influencer behavior on Instagram during the coronavirus outbreak, the influencer-marketing platform Klear's research team surveyed 1,021 Instagram creators who had an average of 51,400 followers.

Instagram creators surveyed by Klear reported a 21% jump in the number of views on Stories per day starting on March 15 when many regions began implementing shelter-in-place policies.

This increase coincided with more content from influencers who began posting about one more Story per day, on average. 

Read the full post on the four key takeaways for influencers and marketers from Klear's report here.

Industry updates:

Twitch Partner streamer and TikTok creator Neeko signed with the influencer talent management firm, Night Media.

Talent management firm and social content company Fullscreen expanded its roster with six new digital media clients including actors and creators Samantha Cole, Nick DiGiovanni, Darcei Giles, and Yoatzi Castro, and TikTok creators Mitchell Crawford (2.9 million TikTok followers) and SwagboyQ (3.4 million TikTok followers). Fullscreen will provide management services for every aspect of each talent's career: film and television, publishing, podcasting, music, and more.

The popular Instagram Pomeranian Jiffpom signed with the talent agency A3 Artists Agency. Jiffpom has 10 million followers on Instagram and over 20 million followers on TikTok.

Here's what else we're reading: 

Everyone Is Giving Away Cash on Instagram

On March 18, as states sent nonessential workers home and companies prepared to cut costs, the fitness influencer Paige Hathaway posted a message to her more than 4 million followers on Instagram.

“I know it’s tough with the quarantine especially for those who are unable to work so I wanted to do a giveaway for someone to receive $5,000 DOLLARS,” she wrote. The post, which was removed from Instagram shortly after this article published, featured Ms. Hathaway fanning out a stack of $100 bills.

Her fans began tagging friends and commenting about how desperately they could use the money. “I could use a miracle right about now,” one woman wrote. Several users posted prayer emojis.

As the coronavirus has continued to disrupt American lives and livelihoods, Instagram has been overrun with cash giveaways like Ms. Hathaway’s. Several popular personalities have offered cash to their fans in exchange for tags, follows and comments, including Harry Jowsey, a star of the new Netflix reality show “Too Hot to Handle”; the lifestyle influencers Caitlin Covington and Laura Beverlin; and the rapper and social media star Bhad Bhabie.

To the more than 26 million U.S. residents who have filed for unemployment over the past five weeks and millions more who are struggling to cover unforeseen costs such as medical bills and weeks worth of food purchased all at once, these cash offers may look like lifelines. But though they are frequently framed as charity, the giveaways are part of a growth scheme that has become pervasive on Instagram.

Ms. Hathaway, for instance, was paid thousands of dollars by the social media marketing firm Social Stance to promote the giveaway on her feed. Potential entrants were instructed to follow a list of around 70 accounts that Social Stance was following. The company charged $900 for a slot on the list. Those who purchased “sponsor” slots could expect to earn thousands of new followers overnight.

“If you tell someone they can gain 50,000 followers in three days they’re going to do it,” said Nathan Johnson, 19, who helps YouTube and TikTok stars orchestrate giveaways. The business he runs with his 16-year-old friend Carter is simple: They pay a big influencer a certain amount of money up front to “host” a cash giveaway, then turn around and sell follow list slots to earn a profit.

“Entrepreneurs buy spots to gain followers in order to sell their courses or ebook,” Mr. Johnson said. “Models will do it to gain followers to increase engagement and charge more for brand deals. Doctors do it for credibility and to grow their personal brand.”

Louisa Warwick, the founder of Social Acceleration Group, has orchestrated seven Instagram giveaways with influencers and actresses including Tori Spelling and Natalie Halcro. Her firm is currently selling sponsor list spots for an upcoming cash giveaway by the “Teen Mom” star Farrah Abraham. Interested parties can pay just $270 to be on the list; in exchange, Ms. Warwick said they can expect to gain thousands of followers.

Instagram giveaways have been around for years. They initially emerged around 2016 when small businesses and bloggers began hosting “loop” giveaways. In order to enter, you’d have to follow a group of people, or “loop,” then return to the original person’s page and comment. Loop giveaways are frequently sponsor-free and exist as a collaboration between influencers. The giveaway that Ms. Covington and Ms. Beverlin hosted with their friends, for instance, was a loop giveaway.

But last summer, the first major wave of sponsored giveaways began cropping up. At the time, most stars were gifting things like Louis Vuitton bags, but now everyone is giving away cash. “People really need cash more than they do handbags, and logistically it’s harder to take a promotional pic with the celebrity and the bag when everyone is in lockdown,” said Ms. Warwick.

With many brand deals and sponsored trips on hold because of the virus, giveaways have provided big influencers with a way to make quick money from home. “Corona has been tough on influencers and if you get told you can make $20,000 for posting a giveaway on Instagram you’re probably going to do it,” Mr. Johnson said.

Purchasing sponsor slots on giveaways has also become the fastest and cheapest way to grow on Instagram. “You suddenly get this surge of followers,” said Dr. Thomas Connelly, a cosmetic dentist, who has purchased spots in Kardashian giveaways. “What these giveaway campaigns do is force exposure to live human beings. Then, those people can make a choice as to whether they want to keep following.”

Dr. Connelly said he is pitched daily to be a sponsor. “In advertising there’s really not a whole lot of choices these days,” he said. “With this, you pay anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000, and you become one of these 70 people that Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner says, ‘Hey go follow if you want to win cash.’”

When it comes to the people buying giveaway sponsor slots, “the biggest buyers are plastic surgeons and entrepreneurs,” Mr. Johnson said. Ms. Warwick echoed his assertion; each of the giveaways she has organized included doctors.

“It’s the demographic and age group we’re targeting,” said Dr. Nicole Nemeth, an owner of Plastic Surgery of Westchester. “It’s the people we’d want to market to, they are the ones looking at these influencers.”

“Giveaways allow you to target a demographic that you normally would not be able to reach with such precision,” said Dr. Neal Blitz, a foot surgeon known online as the Bunion King. In his case, he said, that is “women who wear heels and their feet are devastated by the heels.”

“There’s all different ways you can advertise of course,” Dr. Blitz said, “but the younger generation is more interested in Instagram and knowing who you are.” He has sponsored several large influencer giveaways and said that they result in followers who have a much stronger bond than if they simply find your account through a Google or Facebook ad.

Preston Million, the founder and C.E.O. of the digital marketing agency Influential Management, said that up-and-coming artists also frequently buy sponsor spots in influencer giveaways. “It helps with perception when they’re trying to shop themselves around to labels,” he said. “The alternative is to buy ads through Instagram, which can be more expensive. Normally, it would cost around $10,000 to gain 100,000 followers through Instagram ads. Through a giveaway, you could spend $2,000 and grow the same amount.”

Jordan Lintz, a founder of HighKey Clout, one of the largest Instagram giveaway companies, said that he doesn’t like to frame it as buying followers. “It’s like sponsoring an internet event,” he said. Upcoming giveaways are announced on their verified Instagram page, and past winners and campaign results are featured prominently on the company’s website.

Not all giveaways are run with the same level of transparency. “A lot of meme pages are doing fake giveaways right now,” said Mr. Johnson. “Some influencers are too.” Mr. Johnson said that a legitimate giveaway will always announce and tag a winner. Liraz Roxy, a social media influencer in Los Angeles, said she’s refused to participate in any sponsored giveaways. “It’s all very shady,” she said.

A Facebook company spokesperson said that many cash giveaways could be in violation of the company’s community guidelines. “This isn’t the kind of experience we want to create on Instagram,” the spokesperson said by email. Additionally, according to Robert Freund, an attorney who offers a legal training course for influencers, many of these cash giveaways could violate state sweepstakes laws.

“There are a lot of state, federal and local laws that regulate the sweepstakes promotional space and there are special considerations when you run promotions online with influencers,” he said.

For instance, these giveaways need clear terms and conditions, and must verify the age and location of participants, something Mr. Freund said he hasn’t seen most influencer giveaways do. Influencers should also disclose that they are being paid to promote these giveaways.

“Right now there’s a trend where influencers are making it seem like these cash giveaways are out of the goodness of their heart because of Covid,” said Mr. Freund. “But, if they’re getting compensated, they need to disclose that fact when they promote the giveaway and make posts about it. Disclosure in influencer marketing is an area that the F.T.C. is paying a lot more attention to recently and regulators are watching.”

Some influencers, however, aren’t being paid to promote free cash — they’re just giving it away. On April 15, Katie Sturino and three fellow body positive influencers pooled together $6,000 of their own money for a giveaway. Entrants were encouraged to follow all four influencers, and the winner was selected at random.

Ms. Sturino frequently gives away products on her page, but she thought money would be better put to use right now.

“The reception was positive,” said Ms. Sturino. “People were excited that we were giving away cash and they were excited to learn about other Instagrammers who have a positive message. What we did didn’t feel shady. It was a really cool positive thing.”

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