Recently, we heard from Adam Mosseri (head of Instagram) about the decision for Instagram to remove the public display of likes and views on an Instagram post.

In Adam’s words, "it's about young people...The idea is to try to 'depressurize' Instagram, make it less of a competition and give people more space to focus on connecting with people that they love, things that inspire them."

Um...companies like Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) don’t really make big decisions like removing all the hearts from public view just to...make you feel better? I’d love to believe that, but the reality is, you *can* indeed still see how many people have liked your posts/videos, but other people can’t.

It’s sort of like how when you get your scores on an exam back and like even though those scores aren’t broadcasted, you still sorta know who got the highest score (because they’re out here straight WAILING over an A- while you just stand awkwardly next to them shaking your head and hiding the goddamn C+ from their sight) and maybe you even know what your friends got, because, well, people talk.

So what is the real billion-dollar reason for Instagram’s latest decision? AD MONEY, BABY 🤑

Let me back up though, for just a second.

At this point in the decade (!), we all know what influencers are. We also know what influencer marketing is, sort of. Essentially, with the rise of Instagram and better quality phone cameras, an entire new industry of celebrities were born: influencers. Some of them, through a combination of blogs and Instagram-saavy, quickly amassed huge numbers (in the millions! ) of followers.

Needless to say, brands have started to take notice of this demographic of people and eventually came to the realization that-- hey, more people are spending time on this app called Instagram, some of those users have over millions of followers-- so why don’t we take some money out of our marketing budget, and instead of spending it on a magazine ad, pay these people with millions of followers (i.e attention of millions of eyeballs) to advertise our products for us?

And thus, influencer marketing was born.

influencers are segmented by interest area: fashion, fitness, travel, photography, etc.

This new type of advertising/ marketing has gotten so valuable that one single sponsored post can rack a company up to 1.2 million dollars (if you’re Kylie Jenner, that is). But not all influencers work like that.

Currently, here is how the process works:

Let’s say Adidas is launching a new line of sweatshirt for the new season. They want to get the word out there, and want people to know about this new line...but they don’t really know who the ‘proper’ influencers are. So they go and find an influencer marketing agency, and ask this agency to find them a bunch of influencers and also submit a budget.

This agency will determine how much Adidas is willing to spend, then log onto some image search entreprise solution, type in a couple keywords: “active” “athlete” (you get the gist)... and then they will find maybe 3-5 influencers that fits the criteria: follower numbers, like-to-follower ratio checks out, their followers seem like the type of people who would buy Adidas, and that Addidas could be a good fit for this influencer’s overall style. Then they figure out some more details: in order for this to be a success, the influencer should probably post at least 3-5 posts with the new line of product. Maybe there’s a hashtag they should use. They should probably also post 2-3 stories a day with the new product!

All of this is written out into a proposal deck, and then sent back to Adidas. Once that is signed off, then the agency will approached the influencers either via their DMs-- or, if they are a full-time influencer with a large following, their talent manager or agent. All of the requirements, including compensation, is drafted up into a legal agreement and sent over.

After some negotiating and back and forth-- viola! You are now ready to launch your influencers marketing campaign for Adidas!

Here’s what Instagram doesn’t like about the whole process I just described: they are seeing zero dollars from that transaction that just happened. This influencer basically built their followers by posting content on Instagram, and now are taking all this money from Adidas just to post on Instagram? With Instagram seeing no upside?

Well, now we are getting to what you are here for...the decision to remove public views of likes from a post.

Removing likes from the public view is Instagram’s way of taking back some portion of that brand money that‘s currently going directly from the brand to the influencer. Remember that in our hypothetical, Adidas went and found an influencer, and paid money to the influencer to post on Instagram to their followers? And remember how part of the reason why Adidas decided to go with our influencer is...well, because they liked the numbers and all the data about engagement that they saw?

Sure, even with removed likes, they can probably reach out to the influencers individually and get the engagement data. Or….they can ask Instagram, who has all of that data. In fact, these brands wonder, with how effective Instagram targeted ads are...maybe they should just go with Instagram ad placements?

I opened instagram as I was writing this and was hit with these two lovely ads

Have you noticed recently just how frequent you’re getting ads-- traditional ads-- being placed between your friend’s instagram stories? Apparently Instagram thinks I love comfortable pajamas and streaming services...they are totally right, btw. Which is why they are so good. Instagram *knows* me, more than the influencers I follow ever will.

And *this*, my dear readers, is why brands will actually prefer to shove some of that marketing budget over to Instagram to run and place these ads. This way, they get the engagement data and insight, they get the guaranteed reach numbers, and they get the exact demographic they want to target. You don’t even want to know how much Instagram/ Facebook knows about you.

But wait! This does not spell the end for influencers. They still remain quite valuable, and brands will still use influencers. In the future, maybe you’ll start seeing influencers stories and posts from those influencers you don’t even follow, because the brand has paid Instagram to place it in your feed. Also, influencers-- the big accounts, at least-- will still generate a good source of organic attention that is outside a brand’s immediate reach. The only difference now is that instead of Adidas forking the full amount over to the influencer, they will also split some of it with Instagram's ad platform (aka Facebook Ads Manager). The mid-tier influencers will likely phase out, since they are not likely to be great ROI for brands. Micro-influencers might actually see more pick up as smaller brands get squeezed and cannot spend the money on Facebook/ Instagram ads-- they are also great for content generation.

So what’s our lesson here?

Well, first of all, I think this could potentially spell out some platform risk that Facebook/Instagram is creating. For brands, negotiating with an individual influencer, however powerful, is probably preferable to negotiating with Facebook (especially smaller brands!).

Theoretically, the influencer may decide to take matter into their own hands and publish their own engagement data, but the problem there is that with removing likes from public view, its fully expected that engagement number will drop (because if I don’t see other people liking something, I am more likely to passively scroll past some content instead of engaging with it), so it actually will hurt influencers to publish the data- at least in the short term- since those numbers will not look as great as the metrics that were in place before.

At the end of the day, the people who do end up hurt the most by Instagram removing likes are influencers and creators themselves. This just goes to show that, when a platform owns your followers, it means that platform also has the power to take away your influence once they realize that monetary value is accruing to you.

Will the influencers rebel? Some will probably try. Will it matter? Who knows. So...be careful out there, y’all. Own your data. Own your platform. Or just start with owning your goddamn blog.

With love,

Katherine