> “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how to get the best Instagram experience by being part of the community, connecting and interacting with the people and things they love,” the company told Adweek. Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
"So, what I told you was true... from a certain point of view."
I think we'll find that their numbers are saying the loss of revenue of people leaving because they have to always login is far less than the uptick in revenue to be made from the changes this will allow. They rolled this out weeks ago in Australia, and would have been watching for the backlash.
I think (the following is pure speculation) this is just a first step of a number of changes around monetisation. This basically locks the backdoor, where they prevent people not on the platform from browsing feeds for free.
The real change is going to be when users (celebrities and businesses mostly) find they have to pay to reach all of their followers (who surprise, surprise now have to be logged in). They may not require "boosting" for under 1000 (or even 10,000) followers which will keep most users and wannabee influencers on the platform, even if they have to give a couple of dollars to Instagram when they push a product. You may find the advertisers end up just paying more.
It's the mega-users with multi-million followers they want to monetise, Users who get paid 10-100s thousands of dollars per post where Instagram doesn't get a cut despite being the delivery platform. Compared to what it costs for advertising on traditional media such as radio or TV, even a dollar to reach 10,000 followers would be nothing.
But you can't enforce payment when their followers can simply logout and view the feed for free. I would expect the popup appearing immediately rather than after a few scrolls to be implemented soon.