AMA on IG Reels with Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri

reels was such an important moment I think it was such a strategic directional decision for the company yeah can you like is it the momentous decision that I'm suggesting it is and can you take me to that decision and was it just like a we're gonna give Ted Talk yeah I mean it was it was I mean real has been huge for us reels is I don't know maybe pushing 50 of time spent in the app at this point not quite there and before Rios We had short form video right and the intro from video

was a big part of Instagram but I don't think we designed the format to really embrace the form factor of a phone and I think you know reels being full screen sound on is more fun and immersive particularly during the pandemic when you're not bothering anybody because you're home focus on creators first person all of these things were ways to embrace where the world is going and the platform in which we were building and we hadn't leaned into all of that and tick tock's rise was just meteoric after years of struggling um to get anything

to be retentive and when you see a competitor to do something I think it's super important to be humble enough to to learn from it and sometimes that will mean building something that looks a lot like it and sometimes it means figuring out what needs its meeting and how you might meet those needs in a way that's more native to what you do and then a range of options in between we lost a whole year I still go back to this this may be one of my biggest regrets the first version of reels we built

was built on top of stories and it just didn't work I mean it was because stories was growing so we thought stories would be a good foundation on which to lean into short form video but the thing that's amazing about stories is how depressurized they are people share it so much to stories and there's just way more stories than anyone has time to see or most people have time to see so the the read-through rate is very low you know I don't know what it is but it's maybe the teens and so to you can't

build a short form video product that particularly focuses on creators if most of the videos they create aren't seen and but we were trying to keep Instagram simple we were trying to double down on the momentum of stories we were trying to lean into how younger people use Instagram and they use stories way more than they use feed and we lost nine to 12 months and we ended up getting it right by leaning into feed and making a couple other strategic changes around recommendations and unconnected content that were right that's a really hard decision after

nine months of what the sunk cost of years saying just keep going but this was all pre-cover 19. if we had a solid foundation before everyone was at home and just spending a whole bunch of time on their phones the whole trajectory of the app would have been completely different and instead these these things all landed you know some before but a lot after and you know mid-2020 late 2020. would it have been like how did it change the trajectory it was just slower like if you would have replayed this if you got it right

the first time I think how big we are relative the competition would be super different it would be super different and we're catching up we're growing really fast I think we're growing the fastest of the big players um but it's um it's very hard because when if you're gonna try and compete and we do right the competition has begotten Fierce for every year since I've been at the company you can't just make something as good as the competition you have to make something that's better because why would I bother switching if it's just as good

or even if it's only 10 better um so you think rails is better than Tick Tock and for certain segments and not for others like Tick Tock is amazing at a couple things they are amazing at um exploration based ranking so discovering new talent and helping new Talent break right you know we for a long time had a strong bias towards showing people things that we were pretty confident they would like because a lot of other people like them and it's easier to rank that kind of content and that sort of reinforces the existing hierarchy

and Tick Tock was really good at building the systems from the ground up to be more content first and to go find things that you might love that you never would have heard of before and therefore it was just really entertaining really entertaining uh it's really good they're they're the I think they still are the most well executing competitor I think we've ever faced there's a couple others that are up there but they're they're I think at the top of that are they the fastest moving competitor yeah um in the video space yeah the other

folk were really fast um really good and I respect a lot is telegram telegram is just the that team is just really good they build something really well and they can pivot quickly and when they decide to do something they get it out