What is Instagram's next big thing? Messaging, perhaps
Instagram, known as a visual communication platform, is looking for way to expand its appeal to its community of 200 million (and growing) users. First it was short-form video and next up is messaging.
Context & Ripple Effects
Late 2013 has been Instagram's expansion year: it added short-form video earlier in the year, switched on its first official advertisements on November 1 with a sponsored Michael Kors photo opening the feed-ad era, and finally launched on Windows Phone on November 20 — albeit without video capture at first. Its user base has climbed from the 150-million mark Instagram cited in October to the 200 million figure attached to this story.
Messaging is the next step being weighed, though it is still unconfirmed reporting rather than an announced product. The pickup was broad for a rumor: eight outlets including The Verge, The New York Times and Inside Facebook ran versions of the story the same day.
First-order effects
- A messaging feature would hand Instagram's 200 million users a private channel inside the app, deepening sessions beyond feed browsing and sitting alongside ad inventory the company only began selling this month.
- Any rollout lands on a team already shipping unevenly across platforms — the Windows Phone app arrived without video — so messaging raises an immediate feature-parity cost on every OS it supports.
Second-order effects
- Private messaging puts Instagram in direct competition for daily session time with standalone messaging apps, the very engagement metric advertisers are now buying against since the feed-ad program started.
- If messaging takes off, Windows Phone users will pressure Instagram to close the parity gap fast or watch their platform's activity migrate to better-supported rivals.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward social networks consolidating around a feed-plus-messaging structure: the public feed as the discovery and monetization surface, private threads as the retention layer.
- How private conversations get monetized stays an open structural question — the sponsored-photo advertising model proven on the feed does not transfer obviously to one-to-one messaging.
The trend: Single-purpose media-sharing apps are layering private messaging onto their public feeds, evolving from content platforms into full communication services.