Instagram is clearly jealous of YouTube — and introducing a raft of changes

Instagram's top executive, Adam Mosseri, has a plan to keep the platform "culturally relevant" — by making it more like YouTube. Meta-owned Instagram unveiled an overhaul of long-form video features on Monday, including a test of horizontal videos called "Features." Taken together, the changes make the app feel a lot more like YouTube.

"We want to be the most culturally relevant platform," Mosseri said in an interview with content creators Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry. "To do that, we just need to show up where people are." The context: YouTube has become a major hit on TV screens, and there's a growing appetite for Instagram-native shows with recurring episodes.

"Subway Takes," hosted by Kareem Rahma, is a prime example of Instagram's strengths and limits. The show started in 2023 as a short-form interview series and, as it grew, expanded with longer-form cuts on YouTube and the streaming platform Tubi. Instagram, however, is where Rahma's show still has its largest audience of 2.

4 million followers. Instagram doesn't want people to go to YouTube or Tubi to see longer versions of shows like "Subway Takes." That's leaving ad revenue and user engagement on the table.

Its new tools are designed to entice creators and viewers to stay on its platform. This isn't Instagram's first time dabbling in long-form content. In 2018, it launched IGTV, a long-form video format and stand-alone app.

In 2020, Instagram rolled out a program that let creators earn money from those videos on IGTV. Four years after launching, the company sunset the IGTV app and shifted its video efforts to Reels. There are a few key elements missing from Instagram's big leap (back) into long-form video.

You can't watch the video while continuing to scroll through Instagram, or multitask by opening other apps while keeping the Instagram content in a picture-in-picture pop-up. There also aren't automated transcripts and subtitles yet. A spokesperson for Meta told Business Insider that there are plans for these features.

For creators, one key question and pain point looms: Will Meta share the honeypot? Mosseri told Rosenblum and Chaudry that Instagram is thinking about ways to test pre-roll and mid-roll ads that could lead to a revenue split. However, he said previous attempts by Instagram to build a creator monetization system comparable to YouTube's Partner Program didn't prove beneficial for the platform.

"We spend more money than we make back by a long shot," Mosseri said of Instagram's previous efforts at broad revenue-sharing programs. Mosseri said that in its previous iterations of content monetization, creators typically didn't produce more content than they already did for free, and the content they did create tended to be lower quality. Still, Instagram will need to "figure it out" as it tries to crack longer-form content, Mosseri said.

"I don't think of platform payments or performance-based incentives or bonuses as a revenue driver," Mosseri added. "I'd be psyched to scale them up for any of these formats — as long as we're breaking even."