Instagram Tries to Boost IGTV Views With Previews in Users’ Feeds

Instagram is trying to get more people to watch longer-form video on IGTV: Starting Thursday, the app is adding IGTV previews that will appear in users’ primary feeds.

Now, when users scroll through their Instagram feed, they’ll see when there’s a new video from someone they follow and will be able to preview the content before watching the full video in IGTV.

Facebook-owned Instagram hasn’t broken out usage stats for IGTV, but clearly the move is intended to ratchet up engagement, which it launched last June. “With IGTV previews in Feed, we’re making it even easier to discover and watch the latest video content from your favorite follows,” an Instagram rep said.

On Facebook’s fourth-quarter 2018 earnings call last week, CEO Mark Zuckerberg boasted that Instagram passed 500 million daily active users on Stories — a feature it copied from Snapchat — but he didn’t talk about IGTV at all.

With the new feature, creators can now share a one-minute preview of their video on their profile when they upload a new IGTV video.

Instagram’s previous attempts to highlight IGTV have included IGTV in Explore, sharing IGTV videos to Stories, saving IGTV videos and allowing for IGTV web embeds.

So far, Instagram hasn’t revealed how it will monetize IGTV. “Right now, we’re focused on delivering on what we said we would — connecting you to creators and content you’re most interested in,” Instagram product manager Ashley Yuki said at Variety‘s Entertainment and Technology Summit in L.A. last September.

IGTV allows users to upload videos up to 10 minutes long to their own channel, while select large creators are able to upload videos of up to one hour.

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