Instagram seems keenly aware that as a platform built on user-generated content, it relies upon the creators of that content to keep its business going. Its messaging has consistently identified creators as its central driving force, and earlier this year, it said, “We want to make sure every creator feels empowered to succeed on Instagram.”
But that messaging is a bit at odds with a new Threads post from Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri.
According to him, Instagram is maximizing its data storage potential and minimizing the costs of that storage by degrading the quality of videos posted by creators it doesn’t think bring enough views.
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“We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views,” he wrote Oct. 27. He added that the system isn’t set to “a binary threshold, but rather a sliding scale.”
Basically, Instagram can’t tell you how many views you as a creator need to get to have your videos rendered in high quality. It can only show you if, at that particular moment, you’re not meeting the threshold. (And by “show you” we mean it will make your videos a little fuzzy.)
Mosseri said Instagram also lowers the quality of older videos whose view counts have dropped off: “If something isn’t watched for a long time because the vast majority of the views are in the beginning, we will move to a lower quality video,” he said.
There is, however, a path up to high-quality. If an older video is “watched again a lot we will re-render at a higher quality video,” Mosseri said. Presumably that practice is the same for creators who start meeting the platform’s view count threshold: their videos would be rendered in HQ moving forward.
“The goal is to show people the highest quality content that we can,” Mosseri said.
It’s understandable that Instagram would want to cut down on server costs. As parent Meta gets more and more into generative AI, it’s been spending heavily on data processing and storage—and we’ve seen similar cost challenges for other UGC platforms like Twitch, which recently shuttered operations in South Korea over data costs. There can also be practical reasons for quality-dropping: Platforms like YouTube lowered automatic video playback quality in an effort to reduce strain on servers and networks at the start of the pandemic.
But people replying to Mosseri’s comments seem to feel the platform’s video quality policy is hamstringing new creators.
“The very heart of it has become solely dependent upon performance, metrics, views, and engagement—so much so that I can’t even control if the quality of my video is retained due to Instagram pushing a bias,” one replied.
Another added, “From a creator’s perspective, spending time on creating high quality content just for it to be downgraded to low resolution sucks.”
Social media consultant Matt Navarra told the BBC that Mosseri’s post “seems to somewhat contradict Instagram’s earlier messages or efforts to encourage new creators.”
“How can creators gain traction if their content is penalized for not being popular?” he said.
Worth noting: Instagram recently instated views as the primary measurement metric across all its post formats. Rather than using different statistics to track activity on formats like Reels, photo uploads, and Stories, Instagram will record one view every time a piece of content starts to play or appears on a user’s screen. So it makes sense that Mosseri would talk about this practice now, when metrics have been standardized.
At posting time, Threads is down, so it’s not clear if Mosseri responded to any concerns or if he posted further information/clarification about the policy. It’s also not clear if this is a new policy, or if Instagram has been doing this for a while. Either way, creators do not seem impressed, and we’re curious if their feedback will change anything.
