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In January 2018, in a conference room at Facebook headquarters, a group of executives (known as “M Teams” within the company) turned their conversations to Instagram. In 2012, Facebook spent about $1 billion to acquire the photo sharing app.

According to three people familiar with the matter, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg congratulated the Instagram executives, saying that Instagram has become an important part of Facebook’s overall business. According to the person familiar with the matter, in 2018, Instagram revenue is expected to exceed $10 billion. And two years ago, this figure just exceeded $1 billion. In the previous meeting, the M team was delighted with the growth of Instagram and stood up for the leadership team.

After Sandberg’s remarks were published, everyone’s attitudes produced some subtle changes. A discussion started – as the fastest growing app in history as a resource dependent on the parent company, should Instagram be rewarded by directing users back to Facebook? Some executives believe that the success of Instagram is a threat to Facebook. This meeting heralds a major change in Instagram.

In eight months, Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced their resignation. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg has appointed Adam Mosseri, a trusted deputy, to serve as the new head of Instagram.

In the 11 months after Mosseri took office, Instagram executives were shuffled. Facebook asked Instagram to double the number of ads in the app. Moreover, the company is embarking on a convergence of messaging services for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram. These changes together convey a message that the era of Instagram’s independence is over.

The past honeymoon

Mosseri has worked in the company for more than ten years. One of the challenges he faced after taking office was to stabilize the organization of Instagram. If Instagram employees continue to lose money for a long time, then Facebook will lose its talents and face great risks.

This work is going on. An insider said that in the past few months, the internal team of Instagram has been reorganized so frequently that employees have created a “reorganization work this week” group on Facebook’s internal message board to show mockery.

The further integration of Instagram and the parent company will make it harder for regulators to split them. Some advocates of strengthening anti-monopoly law enforcement, including the Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, have always wanted to do this. Joe Simons, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission who is conducting an antitrust investigation against Facebook, told the Financial Times that if Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram are fully integrated, it would be difficult to split the company.

Harvard Business School professor David B. Yoffie believes that Facebook’s strategy is “smart”, which provides Facebook with another very successful social platform that has more to do with Facebook’s privacy scandals, false information and other issues. Strong resistance.

“Many users who are disappointed with Facebook switch to Instagram, but don’t know they are a company,” Yoffie said. “If antitrust investigations are moving in this direction, then deep technical links will also reduce the likelihood that Facebook will be split.”

Seven years ago, when Facebook acquired Instagram, the startup had about 12 employees, an iPhone-only app with no revenue. Instagram is known for its film-style filters and minimalist interface, and has a unique position on Facebook. Zuckerberg only occasionally asks the founder of the app to allow it with FAcebook keeps a certain distance.

Instagram usually works in its own separate building, holds a weekly plenary session, and hosts its own holiday party. The building is located near the headquarters of Monroe Park, California. Facebook’s top leaders, including Zuckerberg, rarely appear on Instagram conferences, and vice versa. The employee’s work email is suffixed with Instagram, not Facebook.

Over the years, Systrom and Krieger were not interested in asking Facebook to attend the annual F8 Developer Conference, although last year they eventually sent Instagram’s middle manager to speak at the event.

Although Facebook is known for its data-driven product development in Silicon Valley, the founders of Instagram rely more on intuition. Instagram CEO Systrom is the ultimate determinator of the product roadmap and often involves small things, such as the color of specific features in the app. According to people familiar with the matter, when Instagram first tried to make money, Systrom personally approved all the early advertisements and personally reviewed the advertisements.

However, Instagram is happy to be able to drain from Facebook. In the years after the acquisition, most of its user growth came from Facebook’s main service (internally called Blue App). When a new Instagram user opens the app for the first time, it will suggest that the user link to Facebook and connect to the network of friends. Facebook allows users to share their photos with Instagram and promote Instagram in the form of banners and bookmarks for free in the Blue App. If it’s not a Facebook company, this service will cost millions of dollars.

At the time of the acquisition of Instagram, there were only 30 million users. After the acquisition, thanks to Facebook traffic, the number of users began to surge. By 2015, the company has 400 million monthly users. Systrom no longer personally reviews ads. Instagram started using Facebook’s advertising mechanism in 2015, and its advertising revenue exceeded $1 billion by the end of 2016.

frequent friction

At the beginning of 2018, Facebook’s M team met, and Facebook executives’ views on Instagram have changed. The company’s internal research shows that Facebook users are increasingly sharing Instagram, which may ultimately reduce their time spent in the Blue App. This trend is worrying. Facebook leaders have assigned a team to analyze Instagram and other assets (like WhatsApp) The competitive effect.

Informed sources said that more and more conference executives began to openly discuss how Instagram should “return to the family”. Facebook began testing in different countries to see how Instagram performed with Facebook’s traffic and without help.

Systrom and Krieger have been resisting this “family pressure” in the past, but Facebook’s power has begun to appear in a subtle way on Instagram. In early 2018, Instagram users began receiving notifications related to their Facebook account within the Instagram app.

In May last year, Facebook executives reorganized, and this reorganization brought a new face to Instagram, and Mosseri became the head of its products. Mosseri joined Facebook in 2008 as a product designer and then was responsible for the company’s main source of revenue: news subscriptions. He has a close relationship with Zuckerberg, and it is well known that the two men are running together. This sends a signal of change to Instagram employees.

“Everyone knows that he will be closer to us,” a former Instagram employee said when he left recently.

Despite this, Systrom continues to compete with Facebook’s peers. He hopes to get a better experience than YouTube when watching videos, so he launched IGTV. He believes that the influential celebrities on Instagram are enough to make IGTV compete with Google.

But Facebook has launched Watch to compete with YouTube. At the time, the director in charge of Watch, Fidji Simo, argued with Systrom about whether they would disagree with IGTV and Facebook. Eventually they reached a compromise: Instagram will create a standalone IGTV app, but it will allow IGTV users to also choose to post their videos to Facebook.

At the same time, Facebook investors sounded the alarm in July last year, when the company reported disappointing second-quarter revenue and warned that growth would slow. There are signs that the audience for its primary service is no longer growing exponentially as it was before. Facebook stocks plummeted and the market value evaporated by about $120 billion, the biggest one-day drop in US stock market history.

In a conference call with investors in the same quarter, Zuckerberg praised Instagram for reaching 1 billion users recently, but added: “We believe that Instagram’s use of Facebook’s infrastructure will grow faster than it does. Doubled independently.”

Several predecessors andThe current employee said that soon after Facebook worried about the impact of Instagram on the blue app, Facebook closed the traffic interface to Instagram. Systrom revealed the news to Instagram employees in an internal memo, saying he disagreed with the decision. Instagram managers and the team held an emergency meeting to determine what they should do without Facebook user traffic.

Systrom took paternity leave for the rest of the summer, during which he only attended a gathering to celebrate the milestone of 1 billion users. Instagram employees didn’t see him until the end of September. On a Monday morning of the month, Systrom and Krieger walked into the office of Facebook’s then chief product officer, Chris Cox, and suddenly resigned.

The co-founder then convened a meeting of all staff. The two co-founders said they have been doing Instagram for the past seven years and are now tired of it.

A few days later, Facebook appointed Mosseri as the new head of Instagram.

Adjustment and integration

Since entering Instagram, Mosseri has been careful to avoid major changes to the organizational structure. When he first appeared in front of the staff after taking over the company last fall, Mosseri emphasized that he had spent time talking to Systrom and Krieger and absorbing their values.

He has been working on combating cyberbullying through Instagram, which is also a question Systrom raised. He continued the tradition of weekly full-meeting meetings held by Instagram, which were independent of the meetings held by Facebook.

Mosseri responded to the call to divest Instagram from Facebook. At the Code Conference, which was held earlier this year, he told people that splitting companies like Facebook and Instagram would make it a hit. Work such as mail and fake information is more difficult. One of Mosseri’s changes to Instagram is to bring the organization’s security and policy efforts closer to the rest of Facebook. Under his supervision, Instagram recently added the ability to submit suspicious content to the fact-checking team.

One of Mosseri’s top priorities in the new position is to recruit leadership teams to fill the gap left by about six executives leaving. These people report directly to the co-founders of Instagram, some of whom left Facebook completely, while others moved to F.Other divisions of acebook, such as the Libra cryptocurrency project.

Many of his employees are from Facebook, including Sherin Sandberg’s longtime deputy Justin Osofosky, who recently became the chief operating officer of Instagram and ranked second in the division. Instagram’s head of new engineering, communications and design used to work on Facebook for about eight years. Instagram recently hired a new marketing executive from HP, who reported to Facebook’s chief marketing officer.

Other changes to Instagram are more obvious, reflecting the growing importance of Facebook.

According to people familiar with the matter, at the end of last year, the app’s advertising team received an order from Facebook’s senior management to require the app’s ad load to be approximately twice the number of ads inserted between user posts. Since then, the ad first appeared on Instagram’s Explore bar, the second most popular tag in the app, showing account posts that users haven’t followed yet.

Almost at the same time, Instagram’s new product leader, Vishal Shah, gave a speech to Instagram employees, saying that Facebook hopes to narrow the revenue gap between Instagram and Blue App based on the time users spend. For a long time, Facebook has prevailed in this metric, which is called “realization efficiency” within the company.

Changing the gap between applications, meaning that if Instagram continues to attract users from Facebook, in theory the company’s business will not be affected. So far, Facebook has not achieved this goal.

Despite this, Instagram’s business continues to grow. Earlier this year, SunTrust technical analyst Yousseff Squali said in a report to investors that Instagram is valued at $158 billion as an independent company and said the app has a major role in Facebook’s advertising revenue growth. “. He estimates that Instagram will generate $15.8 billion in revenue in 2019, accounting for about 23% of Facebook’s total advertising revenue. Squali predicts that this will be further improved.

Mosseri spent a lot of time helping Instagram continue to grow. His first visit to Instagram as Asia was in Asia, and Facebook saw the huge growth prospects of Instagram in Asia. He announced the opening of Instagram’s first overseas product development office in Japan, met with potential partners of the app shopping function, and also visited the Korean “K-POP STAR” (National Show, equivalent to Korean good voice) star using Instagram.

He sees e-commerce on Instagram as a top priority. Instagram has dozens of engineers working on its shopping experience, including a new feature that lets users buy products in the Instagram app. Three people familiar with the matter said that this is one of the biggest growth areas for Facebook employees. According to two people familiar with the matter, although the independent Instagram shopping app started last year has been put on hold, the shopping service inside Instagram continues.

At the same time, Facebook further blurs the line between the parent company and its former independent subsidiary. According to reports, the team running the Instagram messaging interface (called Direct) was recently transferred to the Facebook Messenger team. The move is designed to help Zuckerberg more broadly unify the messaging system behind its applications, marking the first time that the Instagram product team reports directly to another department of Facebook.

A few weeks ago, employees of the company were notified that Facebook would add its name to brands such as Instagram and WhatsApp. For example, when an Instagram user enters an app and loads a photo, they will see the words “Instagram fromFacebook.” Similarly, Instagram and WhatsApp employees have recently been told that their corporate email account will be replaced with an address suffixed with fb.com.