If you’ve been using Instagram in the past six months, you’ve probably noticed a slow decline in the amount of photography on your feed. Reels are the main culprits of that change, but there’s more to it than you might think.
I always have one difficult relationship with Instagram for a photography experience, but it’s the absolute best way for artists and photographers to connect with audiences at large, unlike things like Flickr, 500px, or Fstoppers, where the user base is purely photographers. The audience and reach in Instagram is huge and that’s what makes the platform unique. Instagram is a social media experience designed around photos, but it’s not just limited to photographers; it simply allows photographers to grow and get their work in front of anyone and everyone. It allows advertisers like us to have a huge audience to sell prints, find a wedding photographer, discover new landscape photography locations, connect with models for the event. Take your next photo and it’s even created an entire industry of lifestyle photographers.
However, that golden era is fading away, and over the past few months, I have read countless threads online, heard from colleagues in the field, or just friends complaining about how the experience has gone. how bad it got. Over the last six months they’ve been pushing Reels more and more, but did you know they’re paying people to do those Reels?
Get paid with Instagram
The program is provided for business accounts at random and has nothing to do with your current stats from my observations. If you are offered to be part of the Reels bonus program, it will scale based on your current follower and follower count, which means if you have a large following you will need more views to get the same payment. My initial offer was $1,200 for 1.09 million views over a 30 day period. Thankfully, the payouts actually scale very fairly.
With less than 20,000 views, I made over $200, which means even if you are a person with a small following, you can still make a little extra money. Above, I’ve included a few pictures of the process from the first month I got paid to do Stories, and you can get an idea of the scaling. Without analyzing it too closely, it seems that after the $200 mark, the payout becomes linear.
I ended up being quite lucky. While the XPan is perhaps the most famous body, it’s not the only panoramic camera useful in this role. In fact, there are a few cases where it’s less than ideal. The reels are pushed by the algorithm. I don’t know the science behind it, but we can make some educated guesses. Based on my observations, if your Story is saved and shared regularly, Instagram will continue to push it to more people. Watch time is also important, but that’s not the insight provided by Instagram metrics. What’s different about Stories from photos, however, is that in the past, you had to visit the Explore page to really have something stand out outside of your following. Most Reels are seen by people who don’t even follow you. I don’t have a record of stats for this particular Story since I got rewarded for those views, but I’ve included what the stats are now, keep in mind that the majority of views I receive stopped right after the payment month.
I reached my goal of 1.09 million views and got paid full amount and also gained over 1,000 followers which is great. The next month, they offered me the same payout size, but none of my Stories ended up being distributed as the first one did, so I just walked away with a little over $400. After that month, Instagram moved posts on target by a massive amount, 10 times to be exact. Although my following didn’t grow much, they changed my view target from 1.09 million views to 11.02 million views. I didn’t really want to chase a moving carrot, so I stopped caring about those after that point, but I still really appreciate the reward.
Keep it scrolling
The truth is I hate being Reels. They feel too superficial and provide no real quality or satisfaction to me. Stories I made with factual information worked well, but simple stories that I combined with some random sounds or average music were much better. As if the harder I tried, the worse they got. This makes me really unhappy, but as long as I approach it as “work”, I can ignore those feelings. I’ve also found that all that really matters is the number of posts, not the quality. There is no correlation between effort and results, and you just need to do multiple Stories to end up with an algorithm-driven Story. Adding a moving carrot to chase money just makes people create more and more frivolous content.
Even if you skip Stories altogether, you’ll still find that sponsored posts become the first thing you see when you open the app. They’ve also started recommending content from people you don’t even follow, and they’re working on an update that will let people post 9:16 photos instead of the previous largest ratio of 5:4 I would be very curious to know if this added photo size will get more photos on the feed, but honestly, many photographers have struggled to get the shots. square or 5:4 ratio that suits their portfolio. The entire landscape genre has its own visual orientation.
I know many photographers who have moved to Twitter, but I’m not sure it’s a great alternative. Yes, it completely brought our work to be displayed in a purer form than Instagram ever did. Enables high quality images, without limited aspect ratios and image libraries. The point is that Twitter is a text-centric social media platform. The first word, and everything else is secondary. While Instagram restricts the photos we post in many ways, it has brought our work to everyday people because it is a photo-based platform. There are a lot of good photographers working to create inclusive communities as long as you don’t let yourself get caught up in the pro/anti-NFT debate. However, none of that replaces what Instagram already does best: attract billions of people daily who are likely to scroll through your work.
I’m not sure what happens next for photographers, and it could be the end of the golden era of the accessibility of our work to the public. You don’t really know what you’ve lost until it’s gone, do you? I’d like to know what your experience has been so far and where you think the next social wave will come.
