How Instagram Became the Center of the Universe

0:28The Colin and Samir show is supported by Shopify. and you want to launch a business, there's truly never been a better time to be an entrepreneur than right now. So if you want to check out Shopify, you can get a free trial at shopify.com slash Colin and Samir. And you can have a conversation with Sidekick. For the past 15 years, we've spent almost every day thinking about our next YouTube upload. But for the first time this week, we've been focused on Instagram. Now, this is largely because we're fresh off our appearance with what could be considered the platform's biggest show, Subway Takes with Kareem Rama.

1:00And if you haven't seen it yet, we'll play a bit of Colin's episode. So what's your take? When two men approach each other for a handshake, there are far too many options for what that handshake could be. It's confusing. We need to consolidate and get on the same page. 100 % agree. Wow. Unbelievable. And yet we agreed on some sort of weird handshake there. You thought this was weird. I felt strange. It made me uncomfortable. Just have to say, I think I've opened up a can of worms here because I can tell as people come up to me now, they're extra nervous. Yeah, I watched it. Which has made me more nervous.

1:31Yeah, I watched it out. I'm not sure I should have given that take. So if you're unfamiliar with this show, there's a show where Kareem interviews people on the subway and they give their takes. And he interviews everyday people. He interviews people like us. He interviews people like Woody Harrelson, Austin Butler. Zoe Kravitz. The list goes on. This is a daily show. And the reason this has interested us so much is because we're podcasters. But Kareem's show, Subway Takes, is the number three podcast in the U.S. and that show is built for Instagram. So this has really opened our eyes to all of Instagram and recognizing that a lot of breakout creators and breakout formats are stemming from Instagram.

2:11And the more we dug into it, the more we spoke to some of our creator friends, it seems like all of them are really turning their heads towards Instagram. So on this episode, we talk about how and why Instagram has become a place for creative experimentation, for cultural relevance, and for real revenue. Basically, how did Instagram become, according to us, the center of the universe?

2:39Okay, can we start this conversation in the Screen Time app? Ooh, I'd rather not, but... Let's do it. Yeah. Let's open up Screen Time right now. All right, I'm going into apps most used by the week. All right, let's talk. What's number one? Samir, I move way slower through my phone. So like, give me a second. Are you being serious? Yeah. I'm like, I know I'm only 36, but I operate like a 68-year-old. Okay. Screen time. Are you being real? Just give me a moment. Screen time and then apps. See all apps and website activity. Oh my God, dude. Okay. We can't even include this. That's crazy. And then scroll down to Instagram.

3:16No. And then go to last week. Let's just switch. No. I'm going to give you my phone. I'm going to take your phone. Look at my screen time. Oh my gosh, Samir. Read it out loud. What's number one? Instagram, number one, 12 hours, 13 minutes. I spent 12 hours and 13 minutes on Instagram last week. Hold on, wait a minute. So how much would that be across an entire lifetime? I'm going to look it up right now. Wait, what do you mean? Like, let's say you spend 12 hours and 13 minutes a week on Instagram for the rest of your life. Oh, okay. If you spent 12 hours and 13 minutes on Instagram every week for an average lifespan, that would be a total of 4.65 years of your life.

4:00Oh my God. You're essentially going to spend five years of your life on Instagram. Samir? Okay, dude, you spent five hours and 30 minutes on Instagram last week. It's not, we're not that different. You'll spend two years of your life on Instagram. I mean, yeah, when you say it like that, that's also not great. It's not great. All right, wait, I actually don't know the rest of my numbers. So for you, you have Instagram at five hours and 36 minutes. You have messages at three hours, Slack at three hours, and YouTube at one hour and 12 minutes. That's really interesting. I watch YouTube on my TV.

4:32Ah, I see. Okay. So you have messages at seven hours, YouTube at six hours, TikTok at four and a half hours, Spotify at two and a half. Samir, how do you LinkedIn an hour and a half? How do you even fit all of this in? I live my life on social platforms, man. That is our whole thing. I'm the real deal, dude. I'm on social platforms. You gotta like, you gotta touch some grass, man. Okay, wait. Now just go down to pickups. Cause for you, this is really interesting. Last week, uh, you picked up your phone and opened Instagram 194 times. That's the first app you picked up your phone and opened is Instagram 194 times.

5:13163 for you. So I'm, I'm opening it less and using it longer, you are opening it more and using it shorter. I'm opening it like a nervous tick. Yeah, right. Okay. So of course, this is a significant amount of time that I've spent on Instagram in one week. But a lot of this has been because I have also been very, very into the fact that I think Instagram is the center of the media universe. And I've shared this with you. And especially over the last week, I've been studying the platform to really understand what is going on on Instagram right now. And I felt this probably for the past year or maybe year and a half.

5:56There was a big moment where long-form content, you know, is dominating. Of course, there's a lot of narrative around YouTube becoming TV. Shorts comes out. People are kind of trying to navigate what shorts are. Short form comes out. We are big proponents of the fact that long-form content is where you build depth on audience. But then this year, it felt like short-form content and Instagram-specific shows started to take the helm of cultural relevance. Specifically, when we think about Subway Takes with Kareem, Trackstar with Jack Coyne, it started to feel, and I think this is real, that Instagram is the center of the cultural universe.

6:36So as we looked at this, we came up with three reasons that we'll go through, you know, how Instagram became the center of the cultural and creator universe. This first one, in my opinion, is just that they have owned the phone. They owned that screen. We talk a lot about YouTube or YouTube owns the TV screen. Instagram, in my opinion, has solidified themselves as the owner of that screen. And I'm sure you could look at other metrics of usage across different demographics and like TikTok still comes up above Instagram. But from what we're seeing, specifically with shows like Subway Takes, which was really cool, we were able to be on.

7:15And my episode just came out. what it seems like is that like Instagram is the starting point for these types of shows. Like it is the actual home. You look at Trackstar on TikTok versus Instagram. You look at Subway Takes on TikTok versus Instagram. It seems like Instagram has a much more stable way of delivering these shows to audiences, right? That like it's the starting point. Whereas I think in the past, actually, we would have said that YouTube is the starting point for some of the more premium shows, and then it gets clipped and shows up on Instagram. Exactly. I think it used to be long form getting converted to short form.

7:53We're now seeing short form getting converted to long form. Now, I think if we just look at owning the phone, and of course, I think I'm a pretty good baseline for the general public. Five years of your life on Instagram? I think so. You're probably right. I mean, look, everyone who's listening to this, open and tell me, are you more Colin or more Samir. Are you 12 hours in a week or are you five hours in a week? Even when we're looking at those numbers, that is so significant. Even at the low end, if five hours is at the low end, that is so significant to spend time on one platform for that amount of time.

8:28It feels like it's become everyone's home screen. You open up your phone. That's what it feels like. Yes. You open up Instagram. And I think largely it's because of the fact that everyone is on there. My parents are on there. My college friends are on there. My high school friends are on there. And my favorite creators are on there. And creators being on there is actually a smaller piece of the puzzle. It's actually more significant that my friends and family are on there. now i think when you uh when you expand out and add a show like subway takes into that environment you get a little bit of monoculture which we don't really have in other places and you being on subway takes so your episode goes live within six minutes i had texts from all kinds of friends our group chat with our friends uh you know my high school friends my college friends being like Yo, Colin's on Subway Takes.

9:24Same. I had people from middle school, high school, family, friends, cousins, everything. Before your episode of Subway Takes had 100 ,000 views, more people had watched it than had watched a YouTube video of ours with a million views that I knew personally. I feel that the reaction is somewhat similar to some of the posts we've put out on Instagram in the last week, right? We're like, put out a lot of YouTube videos. I have to meet a pretty specific crowd to have the YouTube video be the conversation. Put out an Instagram post or a video or a reel, and it feels like the same thing. That day, friends, family, they bring it up.

10:08So I think one of the greatest signals of where the media landscape has come in one year was the New York City election, the mayoral election. and there's a great quote i don't remember who it's from but it's that elections give us a glimpse into the media landscape and if we look at the presidential election of 2024 that was definitively the podcast election we saw the long-form podcast come to life in a way that i don't think the country understood how significant the long-form podcast was andrew schultz was flagrant theo vaughn Joe Rogan, Call Her Daddy, these, one year ago, were the cultural epicenter.

10:52That's where everyone was getting their information. Now, context matters. This is the New York City mayoral election. But if that was the podcast election, this was the Instagram election. This is a quick and dirty tally. But from when early voting opened on October 25th to election day on November 4th, both Zoran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic candidates, appeared on Instagram shows. So Zoran went on Subway Takes. He went on Trackstar. He went on a lot of shows. Cuomo went on a couple shows as well. But the difference in viewership was very significant. Zoran Mamdani, his appearances attributed to 177 million views on Instagram and Andrew Cuomo, 6.7 million views.

11:38and Zoran did go on a long form podcast, which he went on flagrant, a New York, you know, very New York show. But his approach to media was not long form podcasting. It was short form interview show. And I think what it shows us is where the talk show has gone in one year. The talk show went from long form YouTube, long form Spotify to short form Instagram. We get to, we are open to getting to know someone in a like 60 second increment. The amazing thing is what Kareem has done on YouTube. The fact that he has Subway Takes uncut, so his Jason Bateman episode, for example, it's available on YouTube at 14 minutes and 200 ,000 people have watched that.

12:24Right? And that's technically a long form. The other amazing thing is that Kareem and Subway Takes became the number three podcast in the US as a Instagram first show. So now let's talk about some of the other elements. That's got to be called something. Like, you know how in baseball it's a grand slam if the bases are loaded and you like hit it out of the park? Totally. I think it's like a social media grand slam. Like you start on Instagram, you put the long version on YouTube and then the extended version also lives on Spotify and you become the top third podcast. Now, I think one of the main things that Instagram has that I don't think anyone understood was going to be as valuable as it became is the DM.

13:06The DM is one of the most powerful forces in culture. And I think if you zoom out and you recognize like, okay, yeah, actually people talking to each other is always going to matter. I don't think people thought that in the early days of social media. Of course, social media was for that. It was for that purpose. It was communication between people. But as we started to expand, it became modern TV. It became more like, oh, there's creators and there's audience. Instagram was the one that, again, because it was this, it continues to be the space where my friends and family are and creators are.

13:43It is actually what I think Elon Musk meant when he said he wants X to become the everything app. The closest thing we have in America to, you know, the everything apps of China is Instagram. Yeah, I mean, the intended result when you put something out is that people will spark up a conversation. They'll have something to say, that it's remarkable enough to say something and to connect them with someone. And Instagram has the DM, which really no other platform has in a truly meaningful way, to facilitate that result. If you like watching this, okay, here you go. Have a conversation with someone about it.

14:19Adam Masseri, when he came on our show, said that the metric that all creators should look at for Instagram is sends per reach. People ask a lot about the algorithms. I feel like it's a black box. Everyone always feels like they deserve more reach than they get, and sometimes that's the case. But one of the most important things to look at, if you're trying to evaluate how your videos or anything is doing on Instagram, is definitely the sends. I would look at sends per reach. So of the people who saw it, how many of them sent it to a friend? Because that tends to be the content that does the best, because it tends to drive the most value for the overall community.

14:56And that makes a ton of sense. That means if we put out a piece of content and it has a high amount of shares, that people are sending it to each other in DMs, that dictates if it does well. And so the culture of Instagram is that it's conversational media. And I actually think that might be one of the requirements for cultural relevance today. Maybe it's always been, but conversational media, meaning us as creators, is we're throwing something out into the world. And the intention of this is that you can take this and go have a conversation with someone about it. That's always been the intention of media.

15:34If that works, then like you're doing great, right? Like if you make something that's worth water cooler conversation or that's worth talking about, word of mouth is going to spread it. But the functionality of that is very explicit on Instagram. So like even with this, like our hope and a lot of times what we hear about is that people share our takes, our newsletter, our podcast in their Slack. So that's our like conversational medium, right? Is that like we get shared in company Slacks. On Instagram, it is a very explicit thing that it's like, you know, your episode of Subway Takes has 12 ,000 shares.

16:08That's 12 ,000 people who DM'd it to someone else. I just think it's the most powerful metric. I think it is more powerful than sort of any type of like algorithmic marker you'll get on another platform. This is truly a human taking an action, vouching for something and sending it to someone else. And Instagram just sits in this sweet spot where, you know, I think about Snap, if that's on one end of the spectrum where it's like all messaging, right, is Snapchat. You're not really creating in the same type of way for everyone to see. You might be creating for your friends. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got YouTube where it's like, we just create for you.

16:48and it's actually really hard to take what we create and send it, especially within the environment of the app to anyone. Yeah. Right? And Instagram just sits in the sweet spot where they have both and it feels like they have owned messaging on the internet. Like the DM even. Like when you think of the word DM, I just think of Instagram. I don't think of another app. So I do think that, you know, to prove out some of this, a couple of things that I found really interesting, again, coming back to you being on Subway Takes, because I think that's a really important case study for us. First and foremost, Subway Takes is a daily show.

17:30That is insane. Like, this is akin to when Casey Neistat went daily on YouTube and how big of a deal that was. You wake up every morning and see Casey Neistat. you can wake up every morning, open the app that we all open every single day and see a new Subway Take. And it's typically at the top of my feed. It does feel like if Instagram is the home screen of social media, Subway Takes is the first thing on my home screen. Yeah. You want to build a powerful media brand or any brand of any type? It's like show up every single day. So showing up every single day is only possible when the format can be created at any sort of scale.

18:06And what we experienced we went and shot with kareem there's 12 of us we go up to a coffee shop he gives us a talk we get on the f train he number you know we we give each other numbers like hey i'm gonna go first i'm gonna go second whatever he goes who's number one number one comes up what's your take yeah does it four or five minutes next does 12 we get to the end of 12 go back up there's 12 more people at the coffee shop so he can shoot 24 episodes in about an hour yeah in two hours if my math is right, 48 episodes. That's insane. And if it's a daily show, that's 48 days of content shot in two hours.

18:44That's truly unbelievable. That is truly unbelievable. And a few of those can be turned into long form episodes that exist on Spotify, YouTube, and across all platforms. It's kind of like turning my whole world upside down. It is. I can't tell you guys how much conversation we've had internally of like, oh my God, we make a talk show and we make it for YouTube first. Is that... And we take so long to get episodes out. Yeah, like, does that make sense? You know, like, does that make any sense anymore? Yeah. It's crazy. And then I even look at, you know, the performance of your specific episode.

19:21So it's been 24 hours since your episode has gone live. It has 1.8 million views on Instagram, okay? It has 623 ,000 views on YouTube and 270 ,000 views on TikTok. The discrepancy is pretty big across these platforms. And I do think it is because of the DM. Absolutely. It's absolutely because of the DM. It cannot travel on the other platforms. And look, TikTok has DMs, but people do not use them in the same way. I've never opened my DMs on TikTok. Yeah. And YouTube, as of this moment recording this day, does not have DMs. Yeah, totally. And you look at Meta, you zoom out at Meta and it's like Meta owns WhatsApp as well, which is probably one of the other media consumption environments of today, especially if you come from an Indian family.

20:17Everyone is just, you wake up in the morning, you have WhatsApp messages that have all kinds of mixed media and then GIFs and videos and all kinds of stuff. but I do think owning the conversational space has proven to be more valuable than maybe anyone thought in the world of modern media. And I think it brings into question like private consumption versus public consumption of content. And even when we talked about Sora and the rise of AI video, I think AI video will be consumed in private environments, meaning in group texts. And that's where like, that's like the most important That's the most influential environment is the group text or the individual DM.

21:02You know, people watching YouTube videos on a TV screen with three or four people in the room, that's also a really powerful experience. For sure. You remember and connects you to those people in the room. But there's much more scale to the private consumption. Now, one of the criticisms of short-form content or Instagram from creators has been there's not, the platform doesn't pay you. Right? But YouTube is extraordinarily unique in the fact that you get paid when you put up content there. But Instagram is, you know, criticized for not having a payment system. I'll read you a comment right now.

21:39Please. From our Instagram. So we are testing a new format on Instagram called In or Out, where we come up with a topic and Samir and I decide if we are either in or out. And sometimes we disagree. our latest video our latest episode was about instagram rings which is an award that they gave out to 25 different creators there's a panel of judges which includes instagram ceo adam masseri and they reward them with these physical rings as well as these digital rings on their profile that show that they are you know creators that are moving culture anyway we give our take in that video. It's on our Instagram right now.

22:16In the comments, Austin K. Brady writes, Instagram giving rings to whoever is so symbolic of how they think about and treat creators. No real money, no real algorithm, no good information on how to grow. YouTube gives you 55 % of AdSense, a plaque at 100K, and actual analytics of what's working and what isn't. No real money. Yeah. I understand the sentiment from Austin here. And I agree. I will forever you know be die hard youtube because the platform is really built to to service the professional creator who wants to build a career but i will say that for instagram the one thing that has always been true is that if you can build relevance you can solve how to how to get paid you can just you can solve it again we're leaning into subway takes here like great example Subway Takes is incredibly relevant.

23:14There's a way to monetize that. And Instagram gives you the opportunity to be relevant there. So I'm, you know, I'm not immune to the conversation of like platforms should reward creators. But I think Adam brought up some pretty good points on our episode. And these are like maybe controversial points, but I thought it was nice that he was just blunt about it. We can play that section right now. On RevShare, because I want to make sure I'm not skirting the question, the bigger problem is that we haven't figured out a way to do it that isn't just burning cash. So we are running tests for what we call bonuses, which are essentially performance-based incentives.

23:56So we'll pay you to create more content, and then people create more content. But then we measure, does that actually increase the revenue for the app so that we can actually have money to share back? and we are finding that it is much easier to make those programs ROI positive for photos than for videos. And one of the reasons is photos are higher monetization efficiency because you get more ad impressions because you look at photos for less time. But another is that per dollar, when you pay a creator to create something new, they will create more incremental photos and incremental videos because videos are harder to make and really interesting, the incremental content they make is lower quality than the average quality, but that drop is much lower for photos than for reels.

24:46So they'll make another reel, but they will only make one and it's way worse than the reel that they would have created otherwise or the first reel that they would have created either way. And so we are trying to figure out, okay, well, what can we do about that? How can we get this working? Because to me, I need that program to make enough money so that we can pay creators and have those checks be credible. If I send you guys a$12 check, it's probably going to make you think worse of us than if we just didn't have a program. Yeah, I think credibility is the most important because I don't think, you know, if we got a$12 check, I don't think I would be, I would feel disrespected or anything like that.

25:21I would just want to know how did that happen? Yeah, but it might discourage. Oh, it might discourage. But if I knew there was a clear path towards like, hey, this is why it was$12 based off the viewership you got. here's what you can do to increase it. I may feel better about it. The trick though is it's not just about your viewership. It's about the replacement value. So let's say you made 10 reels through the program and they all got really good views. But if you hadn't made it, we would have had just as much engagement from him that wasn't paid for. Then from an Instagram business perspective, the ROI is negative 100%.

26:02So if we paid you$1 ,000, I'm making up numbers now, for 10 reels, and the replacement value was zero, you would look at your reels and be like, they all got 500 ,000 views and these are the CPMs, you owe me X. And it's like, yes, but from a business perspective, if we hadn't paid you$1 ,000 and we would have made the exact same amount of revenue, then we've actually just burned$1 ,000. dollars. So those two points are actually really interesting and I had not thought of them. I didn't really think about them at the time. The first one being paying creators in their testing showed that they would get more videos from the creators, but that the videos were worse.

26:47I've never heard a take like that ever. I mean, I don't know. I'd have to see the videos to gauge what he means by worse. I think that's fascinating to know that they were getting worse videos from creators that yes, they would make more, but that those videos were worse. And then two, this idea of replacement value, which basically is him saying like, yeah, look, Colin, I could pay you to make those reels. But the reality is if you didn't, and he gestures to you, Samir, in the episode, he's like, you'll just find something else that you would want to watch. Yeah, basically what he was saying is, you know, even right now, I'm deeply loving Subway takes.