With 3 billion monthly users, Instagram changes strategy

Instagram has reached the historic mark of 3 billion monthly active users, as announced by Mark Zuckerberg. The platform, at the same time, signaled a definitive change in strategy, prioritizing direct messages, reels and recommended content over traditional photo posts.

According to Fernando Miranda, columnist for CNN Money, the number had been estimated for some time, but was only recently officially confirmed. "Now, officially, Mark Zuckerberg has admitted the number and also launched the forum to get a piece of Reddit," said Miranda.

Meta launches forum to compete with Reddit
In parallel with the growth of Instagram, Meta launched a new platform focused on communities, aiming to compete directly with Reddit. The movement has already caused a 6% drop in the rival's shares. According to Miranda, the central objective of the initiative is to enter the community and conversational artificial intelligence segment. "The main objective of launching the forum is to get into this community thing, of conversational AI, absorbing this data", explained the columnist.

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Miranda also highlighted that Reddit has more than a billion users worldwide, but never became popular in Brazil. The platform is organized into communities of common interests - there are more than 100 thousand in total - but presents monetization difficulties. "Reddit only makes US$1.5 billion in revenue, compared to US$200 billion for Meta as a whole," he compared. For the columnist, Meta has great distribution capacity and can explore this market in a much more profitable way.

Focus on videos and direct messages to increase retention
Instagram's change in strategy also involves user behavior. Miranda explained that Meta identified that the conversation habit is what generates greater retention within the applications. "That's why you open WhatsApp a lot more than any other app you have," he said. Thus, the platform will prioritize videos that are easy to share to encourage the use of direct messages.

"Photos don't generate as many conversations as a video", observed Miranda, adding that TikTok was the one that proved that users' consumption habits had changed. According to him, Meta is skilled at following and monetizing these movements. The columnist also cited previous successful examples: the platform copied Snapchat with Stories, launched Threads as an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) and incorporated TikTok's short video format with Reels - in all cases, surpassing or approaching the original platforms in number of users.

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Artificial intelligence as the ultimate goal
For Miranda, all these moves are part of a larger strategy aimed at Meta's own generative artificial intelligence. "This is just the beginning of Mark Zuckerberg's moves, and all of this to feed Meta's own generative AI," he said. The new forum, according to the columnist, was also designed for this purpose: collecting human conversation data to train the company's AI models. "People increasingly want to hear the opinion of other human beings", concluded Miranda.

The texts generated by artificial intelligence on CNN Brasil are made based on video cuts from the newspapers in its programming. All information is investigated and checked by journalists. The final text is also reviewed by the CNN journalism team. Click here to find out more.

Source: CNN