Krieger: News apps struggle to achieve the organic virality of photo networks
Mike Krieger · Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) · Jun 5, 2025 · at 37:45
Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, explains why his news app Artifact struggled with viral distribution compared to visual social networks.
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“Instagram spread in the early days because people would take photos and then post them on other networks and tell friends about it. And there was like this really natural, like, how did you do that? I want to do it. News was very personal. Like I can't tell me, tell you how many people would be like, I love artifact. I'm like, did you tell anybody about it? Like, did, and they're like, ah, I told one person. And then it's like, it didn't have that kind of spread.”
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