Celebrate the Holidays With Instagram – Is Instagram Trying to Copy Snapchat?
For Christmas 2015 Instagram created a collection of some of the best holiday videos and combined them to create a “Holiday Celebration video montage. The video was composed of video snip its from different Instagram users. Instagram users may have noticed this At the top of their feed during the Christmas holiday season:
This was how they promoted this video montage. By putting it right at the front of every Instagram users feed. Of course this could be bypassed by exiting out in the upper right hand corner but it is still a little ridiculous. Some people believe this was Instagram’s attempt to imitate the Snapchat live story.
By tapping “watch” Instagram users were taken to another page where a collection of holiday themed videos were strung together to create a long montage of videos. The videos were some of the most popular videos created by Instagram users during the days leading up to the holiday season. Extremely similar to Snapchat stories.
Why Would Instagram Want To Copy Snapchat Stories?
The answer to the question of why Instagram would want to copy Snapchat live stories is simple; Money. Snapchat live stories allow Snapchat to sell advertising to companies. They simply insert an ad in the form of a video or an image right into the story. There is a huge potential to make big money doing this. Instagram would love to get a hand into this simple industry.
Could this holiday collection be a precursor to additional collections in the future? Only time can answer question but I believe that this holiday collection was definitely a trial to gain data. This data will be used to determine if it is worth it to set up a feature on Instagram that is similar to the Popular Snapchat Story. If they do decide to add this feature, another question rises; where will the collections be located? Will they be in the same location the holiday collection was put or will they add it to the explore and search page? What do you think? Comment below what you believe will happen.