Instagram: Focus on original content

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has announced that Instagram is making update to the way that it ranks content. The goal is to put more focus on original content.

Mosseri says:

“If you create something from scratch, you should get more credit than if you are resharing something that you found from someone else. [As such] we’re going to do more to try and value original content more, particularly compared to reposted content.”

In response to various questions on Twitter, Mosseri explained that:

Content edited outside of Instagram, then uploaded to the app, won’t be penalized under this change. As per Mosseri: “The idea is if you made it, it’s original. It’s okay if you edited it outside of Instagram and then bring it in via the gallery.”

Posting history is a factor. Mosseri notes that content aggregators are the focus of this update, and Instagram will be able to refer to an account’s posting history as one way of determining this. “If the account is an aggregator, we’ll more likely be able to detect that it’s not original.”

Instagram’s original content ranking is a work in progress. “We build classifiers to predict how *likely* something is to be original, but that’s not knowing. We look at things like who’s in the video, and if we’ve seen the video before.”