Users who are consumers of Reels on Instagram have certainly noticed that viral videos tend to look a little better than videos that aren’t as popular. From the camera used for recording to the editing software and processing, there are many factors at play that the creator can control to some degree. But there is one factor that is not so: virality, whether the video gets more or less views. And this factor is exactly one of the factors that Instagram uses to decide whether our videos will look better or worse.

What happened. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, held a question-answer 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. “Overall, we want to show the highest quality video we can,” the manager said in a story. “But if something is not seen for a long time (because the vast majority of views are in the beginning) we will switch to a lower quality video. Then if it gets a lot of views again, we will show the higher quality video again,” he concluded.

In other words. Whether a video goes viral, has more or less views is not an exact science. Common guidelines, tips for maintaining attention, etc. There are, but there is no instruction manual that can be strictly followed to get millions of views of all the videos. Otherwise all the videos will go viral. In order for there to be viral videos, there must be unseen or very rarely seen videos.

This is true for the majority of users, but there are also great creators and influencers who have large numbers of followers who consume their content. His publications, as a general rule, lead to a large number of visits. So Instagram’s focus seems to be on offering the most popular users the best graphic quality for their videos. It’s something that makes sense from Meta’s perspective, but works against smaller creators because if we follow Instagram logic, their videos will never look as good as those of larger creators.

Image | Xataka

It’s not that important. Of course, according to Mosseri. In response to a user asking if this would make things harder for junior creators, Instagram’s CEO said that while “that’s a valid concern,” in practice “it doesn’t seem to matter much because “Quality is Huge and whether people engage with videos depends less on the quality and more on the content of the video.” According to Mosseri, “quality seems to be much more important to the original creator, who is more likely to delete the video if it looks bad than to the viewers.”

This may be true, but it also makes sense.. While creating content at an amateur level only requires a mobile phone and some creativity, pushing videos to higher quality requires financial investment: a better mobile phone and even a camera, a microphone, a tripod, and more advanced software. It’s normal to want it to look good, because a sharper image also helps retain the user and attract attention. And ultimately making money.

This system means that the content creator has no control over how users view their content; Because ultimately Instagram decides the display quality of the content. But no one said the social media game was fair.

It’s not black or white… Adam Mosseri also responded to another user by saying that this system does not work on an individual level, but instead “works on a collective level.” According to Mosseri, “We tend to move towards higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for larger files) for creators who get more views. It’s not a binary criterion, it’s a sliding scale.”

…nor cheap. We have to break a spear in favor of the meta, and that is, although the potential content users can post is endless, the resources to store and serve it are not. Last year alone, Facebook alone reached 4 billion daily video views. Efficient management of user-generated content is so important that Meta had to develop a chip to process VOD content: MSVP (Meta Scalable Video Processor). We do not include Instagram and WhatsApp in this bag, the contents of which must also be stored.

So Meta’s approach is to apply a simple compression codec at first and increase the quality as the content generates more views. The problem is that we don’t know what “high enough view time” is for Meta when applying the optimization. What seems obvious is that big creators have it easier than small creators or startups.

Image | Wikimedia Commons and Pixabay, edited by Xataka

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