• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, August 2, 2018

Instagram recently launched IGTV, a new application allowing popular users to publish videos in excess of 60 seconds. Instagram sent  the worlds of entertainment, content, and social media into a collective fit with its announcement of IGTV, a longer-form vertical video service, writes Sunny Khillon, a founding partner of Signia Ventures, a $100M seed and Series venture capital fund.

The announcement shows the clear intentions of Facebook’s wunderkind photo-sharing network to march onto the turf of YouTube, and capture a greater share of the digital ad world. First, the target was on Snapchat Stories, now it's squarely on YouTube’s back, (and other vertical OTT apps.) 

IGTV will be ad-free, says the report. This makes all the sense in the world as Instagram can provide a high-quality, ad-free video experience to entice creators and users into the app, subsidizing it through Facebook’s corporate ad dollars. 

Later, as IGTV content becomes higher-end, says the report, the company can introduce a paid version with content otherwise inaccessible before. It is no surprise, says the report, that Instagram is moving further into longer-form content, as its introduction of Instagram Stories in August 2016 precipitated a steep rise in user growth and engagement. 

Daily active users went from less than 20% of monthly active users in October 2016 ,to more than 60% in September 2017. As mentioned, Instagram has more than 1 billion monthly active users now. That statement follows previous announcements for 800 million monthly’s in September 2017, 700 million in April 2017, and 600 million in December 2016, concludes the report.