Instagram, every mention
188 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Instagram
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Benedict Evans 390Toni Cowan-Brown 29Jeremy White 1Benedict Catton 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Instagram comes up
Token pricing
- ▶ 16:04 Benedict Evans Everyone's on Instagram.
The spring updates on AI
- ▶ 19:30 Benedict Evans And then step three is, um, look at my Instagram, and then buy me a coat that will change my look.
What jobs are AI jobs?
- ▶ 22:05 Benedict Evans And so we've had this process of converting high touch into low touch, um, and what we had with, um, the internet was, you know, it turned out that, you know, Instagram substitutes for celebrity magazines, and Instagram is not a magazine,… 2 times in the scene
The end of the network effect
- ▶ 20:37 Benedict Evans At least Mindspace had a network effect, and it turned out that network effects in social are actually quite fragile, and you can have many of them, so you could have Instagram and TikTok, um, but, you know, here we don't have any of that,…
AI and SaaS
- ▶ 15:31 Benedict Evans And you say, have a look at my Instagram and tell me what coat I would like.
How does OpenAI compete?
- ▶ 4:12 Benedict Evans So, AI overviews, reworking Siri to make it good, transforming how Instagram works, much better search results, much better recommendations, better experience in Amazon, and so on.
A double episode: AI differentiation, and Apple does F1
- ▶ 9:40 Benedict Evans And OpenAI have both hired these product people like Kevin Wheel and Mike Grieger, and who both come from Instagram.
- ▶ 12:03 Benedict Evans In that, well, in that sharing pictures is sharing pictures, and it's a commodity, except that actually it isn't, and Instagram isn't Flickr. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:01 Benedict Evans And it was like, they're floating in the search window, but that's not why you use search and Instagram. 3 times in the scene
Looking for AI strategies
- ▶ 0:55 Benedict Evans Or you can pick up the iPhone, and Android, and BlackBerry, and Windows Phone, and Siri, and Memo, and MyGo, and like, all the stuff that was happening, and kind of think, well, they're trying to do this, and this product's trying to do…
- ▶ 8:05 Benedict Evans Mike Krieger founded Instagram. 2 times in the scene
Ai eats the world
- ▶ 32:12 Benedict Evans Um, you know, Kevin Wheel ran product to Twitter and then ran, ran product on Instagram. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:33 Benedict Evans Who will argue that no, no, no, the PC is the platform and smartphones are just for consuming as though these people have never heard of Instagram or TikTok or social media or anything else.
From SAAS software to Formula 1
- ▶ 40:17 Benedict Catton that by clearly what happened, part of the, one way of thinking about it, influences quote unquote, is that they're unbundled in that, you know, if you're an Instagram star, you're, you've been, you've unbundled yourself from what would…
The AI summer
- ▶ 7:59 Benedict Evans On the other hand, if we think about what happened with mobile, you could draw a comparison between Flickr and Instagram and TikTok and Snap. 2 times in the scene
Looking for AI use-cases
- ▶ 14:39 Benedict Evans Is it that I have something on my phone that watches everything I do and sees what I look at in Instagram and what text messages I send to my partner and says, well, from this, I'm going to infer that you're going to be the kind of person…
Tiktok, Apple and Temu
- ▶ 12:25 Toni Cowan-Brown Um, yeah, that's what the rest of Europe and the rest of the world has experienced with, you know, Instagram, Meta,
- ▶ 18:38 Benedict Evans You post, you post a picture on Instagram.
- ▶ 19:58 Benedict Evans Meta could diverse, divest Instagram.
AI and Everything Else
- ▶ 30:59 Benedict Evans I don't, you know, there's, we're kind of at that very early stage where, you know, go back and think about what it was like holding an iPhone in 2008 with the App Store, and there was no Uber, there was no Instagram, there was no Tinder,…
LLMs, links, and the death of links
- ▶ 6:02 Benedict Evans Follow people, and you would like, and you would repost stuff, so that was a step, major step forward after WordPress, as WordPress theoretically had kind of trackbacks, but no one ever really used or understood that, and then of course… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:40 Benedict Evans That dating apps have a lot in common with something like Instagram or YouTube with a recommendation and you like this, so you might like that kind of stuff, except that they generally don't have external links. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:57 Benedict Evans And, you know, I kind of had this conversation a couple of years ago in the context of who owns your data, because I said, you know, if you wanted, if you're trying to build a competitor to Instagram,
- ▶ 16:10 Toni Cowan-Brown And that is my bigger struggle is like I open a, I open YouTube and I've got all of these saved bookmarks in YouTube and it's the same in Instagram and it's the same with saved tweets on Twitter.
- ▶ 23:36 Benedict Evans Um, which is sort of a challenge, which is why in seven, a third party Instagram plans, I guess advertising, but no, no, you have to actually control how it works.
- ▶ 25:11 Benedict Evans That money goes to Instagram and FedEx. 4 times in the scene
The magic customer
- ▶ 1:44 Benedict Evans Now you have this thing called Instagram and you have this internet thing and you don't have glossy magazines in the same way anymore.
- ▶ 17:28 Benedict Evans So this is the whole story of Instagram in particular, um, Instagram versus glossy magazines that, you know, it used to be, and you can see this with Kim Kardashian and all these, that kind of whole cohort, um, that it used to be that… 3 times in the scene
Unbundling ChatGPT
- ▶ 4:45 Toni Cowan-Brown Is this for Instagram?
Threads
- ▶ 0:13 Benedict Evans So, um, for anybody who is not deeply involved in the Silicon Valley bubble, um, Meta slash Instagram launched a sort of Twitter competitor, sort of not Twitter competitor called Threads two weeks ago.
- ▶ 4:36 Benedict Evans So chunks of conversation have got unbundled into Telegram, Reddit, Discord, Instagram, um, GitHub, all sorts of different places.
- ▶ 9:44 Benedict Evans Secondly, they have all the content moderation stuff that they've built over the last 10 years on, met on, on Instagram, and yes, some of the questions are different, but like, they know how content moderation works, which, um, met, um,… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:27 Benedict Evans So step one is you can immediately follow everybody you follow on Instagram. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:17 Benedict Evans And then secondly, you get it, and exactly as you will see in the Discover feed in Instagram, or particularly in Reels, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:55 Benedict Evans And you know, I think, I mean, I mentioned almost in passing a while ago, unbundling Twitter, one of the way places that Twitter got unbundled to with Instagram. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:07 Benedict Evans People like you with a different kind of graph to be using this, which is the, the blend over from Instagram. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:46 Benedict Evans It's quote unquote regulatory uncertainty, unquote, which I think has much more to do with, for example, the fact that it's your Instagram profile. 7 times in the scene
Working out AI questions
- ▶ 25:46 Benedict Evans Um, I mean, it's like, um, like the original Instagram. 4 times in the scene
Buzzfeed News, Reddit and OpenAI
- ▶ 10:14 Benedict Evans It's like Apple, neither can, neither can, neither can Instagram or anything else. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:18 Benedict Evans The, the, the, the, the, the puzzle of, of, of, of, of ChatGPT, um, and sort of many things within this is, you know, Nan, if I go to Instagram and I say, I want to see pictures about this, should I be showing pictures that someone else… 2 times in the scene
Metaverse and crypto - beyond the BS
- ▶ 3:58 Benedict Evans An Instagram type product on a blockchain.
- ▶ 10:49 Benedict Evans You slowly get new things like Uber and Instagram and Tinder and so on.
- ▶ 25:52 Benedict Evans You know, FTX and Binance and, and, and everything else, um, and in, in, in particular NFTs, um, but what we would actually like to be able to do is to build an Instagram on this, or at least build a Twitter on this, and there's a lot more… 3 times in the scene
GPT-4 is here, now what?
- ▶ 28:03 Benedict Evans Um, and so for a certain kind of engineer, that's like really exciting and appealing, but it also meant that like, we've got 10 years more plumbing to build before you can actually make Instagram.
The right questions to ask about TikTok
- ▶ 1:44 Toni Cowan-Brown I think there's a bit of a conversation there worth having, and yet it seems to be output outperforming a lot of the social media platforms owned by us companies, whether that's Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.
- ▶ 13:16 Toni Cowan-Brown And it's interesting because it comes, the fact that we're having this conversation right now, the fact that in America, this conversation about free speech keeps coming up, there's an irony to it, which is by the way, the Europeans have…
- ▶ 17:25 Benedict Evans I don't think in the way that it talks about Instagram or YouTube or Twitter.
- ▶ 19:21 Benedict Evans Yeah, I mean, I, I think there's a sort of, um, it's almost like an incorrect analysis, which was, I'm trying to think of the right word, which is like, we kind of went down the line of thinking that TikTok competed with Instagram and… 11 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:54 Benedict Evans and I think, but wait, so when you add stories, stories are a new primitive, a new building block that you share with your existing network.
- ▶ 20:18 Benedict Evans Whereas Reels, do people follow their friends on TikTok? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:36 Benedict Evans Um, and so that's, that's sort of, and there's, I'm sort of stepping back to kind of a more general point is, you know, sort of what I was saying about YouTube as a network, Instagram as a network, and you place yourself in their hands,…
- ▶ 31:16 Benedict Evans And so if you're on Instagram or YouTube and they can decide to downrank you, then you don't get any traffic. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 39:04 Benedict Evans The important point is whatever it is, it, it does some of the same things as Instagram, but it's also very different from Instagram in very important ways, not just because it's video, but the nature of the network. 4 times in the scene
Generative search
- ▶ 5:18 Benedict Evans Um, when you go to mobile, you get not just Instagram, but also Snapchat, and then TikTok, which are all things that you, I mean, you could certainly do Instagram on the desktop. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:47 Benedict Evans Well, yeah, welcome to YouTube in 2006, but it's, but it's delivering it, which is, is a different thing to Snap, which is Snap is different to Instagram or was different to Instagram until Instagram copied it.
- ▶ 13:08 Benedict Evans And then, but Instagram is something over a billion.
No Soup for You! Regulating tech M&A
- ▶ 0:32 Benedict Evans Um, and meanwhile, the FTC also has a case, um, trying to unwind the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp from now almost a decade ago, which is kind of hilarious.
- ▶ 3:04 Benedict Evans Um, the second point is, and I think it's kind of interesting to draw a contrast between within and Activision, um, because, or within indeed within an Instagram, because kind of the, there's a really interesting kind of theoretical… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:59 Benedict Evans But the alternative is you wait to see whether Instagram becomes the dominant social network, but then it's like it's too late.
- ▶ 24:37 Benedict Evans Um, now all of that is kind of, it's again, because this is obviously not the Instagram or within or whatever, you know, these are things that hadn't worked, but there is this whole narrative that like big tech companies buy and make… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:04 Benedict Evans You know, it's Instagram, I mean, what, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:43 Benedict Evans Is TikTok competing with YouTube or Instagram? 2 times in the scene
All the other things happening in tech part 1.
- ▶ 5:04 Toni Cowan-Brown The Instagrammable version or the TikTok version. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:04 Toni Cowan-Brown I saw this, I saw this, um, this morning, which was according to Deloitte, 60% of Gen Z and 56% of millennials will do at least some of their holiday shopping live on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, which I thought was really interesting… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:27 Benedict Evans But Anchor instead sells direct, but they don't save money by not having stores because they give all the money to Amazon and Instagram, either for shipping and FedEx and UPS.
The FTX face-palm
- ▶ 10:05 Benedict Evans And so in that situation, like buying a token of a user on one of these networks is kind of like buying equity, but on the other hand, but you can't treat the whole of Instagram as though every transaction is a stock trade.
- ▶ 14:02 Benedict Evans And then there's web three, which is people say, well, what if you were to build Instagram on this? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:42 Benedict Evans Um, but that doesn't actually, that doesn't of itself mean you couldn't build Instagram on a blockchain, and the questions of what would it mean to build an Instagram on a blockchain, that raises a whole bunch of other questions. 3 times in the scene
How many metaverses?
- ▶ 11:16 Benedict Evans Um, that you kind of, people that, and yes, you know, you kind of can't imagine what the new forms will be, and we weren't expecting TikTok and Instagram on mobile, on desktop necessarily, um, but there is, you know, the other thing that…
- ▶ 23:25 Benedict Evans But once you're in the browser, like if you're building Amazon, you don't need to worry about how Instagram works. 3 times in the scene
Wondering about generative AI
- ▶ 23:05 Benedict Evans Because, I mean, I'm, I'm sure you sort of seen on Instagram and YouTube kind of, or semi-automatically generated spam with voice sentences. 4 times in the scene
Figma, unbundling and $20bn of antitrust
- ▶ 11:44 Toni Cowan-Brown I wonder, on a different tangent, if we're going to see the same with Be Real, the French company that's, you know, that's offering these, like, pictures of, take a picture of your face whilst you're taking a picture of what's behind the…
- ▶ 12:10 Benedict Evans Whereas it looks like tick to Facebook has struggled a lot more to get reels working because that's actually a different graph. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:58 Benedict Evans And it's very consciously and deliberately a shift from waiting to see what happens and finding out too late, which of course is the criticism of what happened with Instagram. 2 times in the scene
The FTC's antitrust thesis
- ▶ 4:45 Benedict Evans Um, but so the sort of the thesis is, and this is kind of exemplified by things like Instagram and WhatsApp, but also things like Amazon buying Zappos and diapers is that these companies make acquisitions of relatively small competitors. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:43 Benedict Evans Yeah, it's kind of like looking at, um, it's like looking at Instagram and saying, is this, are we going to define this as mobile social, which in hindsight is like, well, duh, yes, but at the time wasn't quite so obvious.
- ▶ 24:14 Benedict Evans And is it reasonable to say this is anti-competitive based on a theory that this might be a seventy five billion dollar company in 10 years, the way Instagram was. 2 times in the scene
Remember AI?
- ▶ 27:00 Toni Cowan-Brown Which goes back to your Wally piece of just, like, you look at the, when you go onto the Instagram page and you see
What's next for advertising?
- ▶ 0:59 Toni Cowan-Brown We've been bringing up Facebook and Instagram, but there's also Snapchat and Pinterest that seem to be all too, all too often forgotten about.
- ▶ 13:35 Benedict Evans And certainly, you know, a search ad is very different from a TikTok ad, which is very different to an Instagram ad, and those are kind of driving different flows in different ways. 4 times in the scene
Shein, TikTok and Netflix - thinking about limits
- ▶ 14:27 Benedict Evans The second part is that one, one of the tabs in the app is basically looks like a combination of TikTok and Instagram, and it's lots of pictures, pictures you usually see from customers talking about their product. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:40 Benedict Evans Um, which is also what YouTube, also what YouTube is, and Instagram is the users of Mechanical Turks telling you what's good.
- ▶ 24:41 Benedict Evans Um, and for Shein, for the, for, well, for TikTok or Instagram, it's all the users collectively clicking like, or tapping like, or swiping up and down. 2 times in the scene
Metaverse - how to be wrong in the right way
- ▶ 3:58 Benedict Evans Like you can build Instagram on a blockchain.
- ▶ 8:34 Benedict Evans I mean, it's like, but it's like, it's like saying you can connect your Tinder with your LinkedIn, with your Instagram.
- ▶ 10:44 Benedict Evans And Apple doesn't have to make Uber and Instagram
- ▶ 13:34 Benedict Evans They all have the network, you know, they have connectivity, and they all kind of want to press it, so it was easier to press the home button and go to another app than to navigate the hamburger menu and to kind of swipe around to find…
- ▶ 16:59 Benedict Evans I can run Instagram and Facebook and Netflix on both of those.
- ▶ 24:14 Benedict Evans You know, if you're, if you're an Instagram user, the important data is who's liked your pictures, and what else they've liked, and who else has liked those pictures, and which pictures you've liked, and what you follow, and what other… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:22 Benedict Evans You've bought that rare thing in the same way that you might buy rare shoes, rare vinyl, or something, and it has some sort of aspect of property and self-expression, and should your ownership of that be tied to Instagram or YouTube, or… 4 times in the scene
Stories in the noise
- ▶ 3:42 Benedict Evans Do you increase, do you put more money on Instagram or into free shipping or into stores? 2 times in the scene
Netflix isn't a tech company
- ▶ 3:11 Benedict Evans And so for, um, for Facebook, you have to be on Facebook because everyone's on Facebook and all your friends or Instagram. 2 times in the scene
The future of Twitter
- ▶ 7:09 Toni Cowan-Brown You just take it from Twitter, which is interesting because I was looking at what's the value of my users on TikTok or on Instagram versus Twitter, and it does feel like there is more value of those users on different platforms, social… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:40 Benedict Evans Ezra Adam Aseri, who runs Instagram, um, so I need to watch his video to see him talking about that.
- ▶ 16:59 Benedict Evans There's a lot of cultural things in there, but there's also, I think, this existential what are we, what is this, how does this work question, which, as we're saying, is a harder question to answer than it is if you're Instagram and you've… 5 times in the scene
The Evolution of networks
- ▶ 3:43 Benedict Evans But of course, then a Tumblr post looks now, it looked a little bit like Twitter, and a little bit like Instagram. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:33 Benedict Evans Um, whereas obviously if I moved from Instagram to some new tool, none of the people who followed me in Instagram will see me in this new place. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:45 Benedict Evans You know, if I were to move from web three Instagram to web three Instagram competitor, everyone who follows my wallet, at least to the extent we understand the model now, who the hell knows in 10 years time, but to the extent that you've…
- ▶ 13:42 Benedict Evans Instagram. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:01 Benedict Evans So you could build your Instagram app. 3 times in the scene
page 1 of 2 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →