There are several qualities of videos on Instagram, and whether your videos perform better depends on one word: virality.

Those who are consumers of Reels on Instagram have probably noticed that viral videos tend to look a little better than less popular ones. There are many factors involved, from the camera used for recording to the editing and processing software, factors that the creator can control to a certain extent. But there is one factor that is not: virality, whether a video has more or less views. And this factor is one that Instagram uses to decide whether our videos look better or worse.

What’s happened. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, hosted a Q&A session on his Instagram profile. In this session, Mosseri confirmed that Instagram reduces the quality of videos depending on whether they generate more or fewer views. “In general, we want to show the highest quality video we can,” the executive said in the article. “But if something doesn’t get seen for a long time (because the vast majority of views are at the beginning), we’ll switch to a lower quality video. And then, if it gets a lot of views again, we’ll show the higher quality video again,” he concluded. .

In other words. Making a video viral or not, getting more or less views is not an exact science. There are general guidelines, techniques for maintaining attention, etc., but there is no instruction that can be strictly followed to ensure that all videos have millions of views. Otherwise all the videos will go viral. For there to be viral videos, there must be videos that are not watched or watched very little.

This applies to most users, but there are great creators and influencers who have legions of followers who consume their content. Their publications tend to attract a large number of visits. Thus, Instagram seems to be focused on providing the most popular users with the best quality graphics for their videos. This makes sense from Meta’s perspective, but works against smaller creators because, following Instagram’s logic, their videos will never look as good as those of larger creators.

that’s not that important either. According to Mosseri, of course. In response to a user’s question about whether this would make it harder for smaller creators, the Instagram CEO said that while “it’s a valid concern,” in practice, “it doesn’t seem to make much of a difference since the Quality change doesn’t make a big difference.” It’s not a big deal, and whether people interact with a video depends more on its content than its quality.” According to Mosseri, “quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to remove a video if it looks bad, than to its viewers.”

This may be true, but it is also reasonable.

. While amateur-level content creation requires only a cell phone and some ingenuity, taking video to a higher level of quality requires a financial investment: a better cell phone and even a camera, microphone, tripod, and more advanced software. It’s normal that a small creator also wants his video to look good, since a clearer image also helps to retain the user and attract attention. And finally, monetize.

This system means that the creator has no control over how users see their content, since ultimately it is Instagram that determines the quality of how their content is displayed. But no one said the game was fair on social media.

It’s not black or white… Adam Mosseri also responded to another user, saying that this system does not work on an individual level, but rather “works on an aggregate level.” According to Mosseri, “We tend to favor higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for large files) for authors who get more views. This is not a binary criterion, but a sliding scale.”

…and not cheap. We must break the spear in Meta’s favor, and that is that while the potential content users can post is endless, the resources to store and serve it are not. Last year alone, Facebook alone served 4 billion video views each day. Effective management of user content is so important that Meta had to develop a chip for processing VOD content: MSVP (Meta Scalable Video Processor). And in this bag we do not include Instagram and WhatsApp, the content of which also needs to be stored.

So Meta’s approach is to apply a simple compression codec first and improve the quality as the content generates more views. The problem is that we don’t know what a “high enough watch time” is for meta when applying an enhancement. What seems clear is that great creators have it easier than smaller ones or beginners.

Image | Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay edited by Hataki

In Hatak | Young tourists from China began visiting random places in droves. There is an explanation: Xiaohunshu.