PolarcutOn October 26, Instagram announced something called Features. It lets you post horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. For now only some creators in Brazil and the US have it.
Why Instagram finally said yes
The interesting thing about this isn't the 90 minutes. It's who announced it. Adam Mosseri, who runs Instagram, has said for years that he didn't want long video on Instagram. He said it again at the start of the announcement. So the first question worth asking is: what changed his mind?
His reason for saying no was simple. Instagram runs on people sending things to each other. You see a Reel, you send it to a friend, they reply. Long video breaks that loop. If you spend 40 minutes watching one video, that's 40 minutes you're not finding things to send. Fewer sends, fewer replies, less of the thing Instagram is actually for.
What changed is that people started watching Instagram together. Instagram has an app for TVs, and it found groups of friends sitting in front of it, passing the remote, picking Reels for each other. Once people are watching together on a couch, a long video stops being the enemy of sharing. It becomes the thing being shared.
So Features is built around one idea: the short video and the long video should feed each other. A creator can link up to 8 Reels to one long video. You see a clip, tap it, and you're in the full thing. If you like it, you can send it to your TV.
That detail, a short clip leading one tap into a long video, sounds small. I think it's the most important part of the launch, and I'll come back to why.
Everyone is asking the wrong question
First, though, the thing everyone else is talking about: money. Instagram doesn't share ad revenue on Features. It's paying some creators directly for now and says it's too early to talk about a long-term model. Within hours, the comments under the announcement were full of creators asking the same thing. Why would I post a long video here, when YouTube pays me for the same video?
If you're a creator, that's a fair question. But I think it hides a more useful one.
Why does YouTube pay for long video in the first place? Because long video has room for ads. A 20-minute video can carry four or five ad breaks. A 30-second clip can barely carry one. So long video is where a video platform makes most of its money, and giving creators a share is how YouTube makes sure the long videos keep coming.
Instagram hasn't built that yet. Which means if you post a Feature today, the video itself earns you nothing. The only reason to post it is what happens after someone watches. Maybe they subscribe to your app. Maybe they show up to your next live stream. Maybe they just become one more person in the audience you sell to sponsors.
That splits everyone who makes long video into two groups. Some get paid by the video itself, through ad share. For them, Features does nothing yet. Others get paid after the video, through subscriptions, sponsors, tickets or installs. For them, Features is useful today, because it's a way to find people, and they already know how to make money from people once they find them.
Most creators are in the first group. A lot of media companies are in the second. That's why the same launch looks like a disappointment to one and an opening to the other.
Media companies already have what Instagram wants
There's a second reason media companies should pay attention. Look at what Features asks for: horizontal video, long video, episodes, something you'd watch on a TV. Almost nothing creators make for Instagram looks like that. To use Features well, most of them would have to change how they shoot.
A media company wouldn't have to make anything. A sports channel already has the match. A news channel already has the broadcast. A streaming app already has the episodes. It's all horizontal, it's all long, and it's all sitting there. The work isn't making new video. It's deciding what to cut out of the video you already have.
What to post, by industry
So what should each kind of company actually post? The answer depends on how each one makes money, so it's worth going through them one at a time. Here's the short version first.
| Who | Post as the Feature | Reels that link to it | Where the money comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sports | "Flamengo vs Palmeiras in 15 minutes" | The equalizer, the red card, the touchline argument | Sponsors, tickets, signups to your own app |
| News | "Tuesday in 20 minutes," posted at 8pm | The walkout, the first drone footage | Sponsored segments priced on audience |
| Streaming apps | "Season 1 in 12 minutes" before season 2 | The cliffhangers | Subscriptions |
| Live streamers | "Every blue shell disaster in 15 minutes" | Single moments from the stream | Sponsors and the next live stream |
| Creators and podcasters | A 10-minute version of a 45-minute video | The best quotes | Sponsors on total reach, YouTube ad share |
Sports
Take sports first, because it's the cleanest case. Say it's a Sunday Brasileirão match, Flamengo vs Palmeiras. It runs 90 minutes plus stoppage time, and almost nobody will watch a full replay on Monday. But plenty of people will watch "Flamengo vs Palmeiras in 15 minutes": both goals, the penalty that got waved off, the red card, the last five minutes. That's the Feature. The Reels are the moments people send each other: the equalizer, the red card, the coach losing his temper on the touchline. Each one links to the 15 minutes. Someone sends the equalizer to a friend, the friend taps through, and now they're watching the whole story of the match instead of one clip of it. The same works for an NFL Sunday: "every touchdown from Chiefs vs Bills" in 12 minutes.
The money comes from sponsors, and from signups if the league or club has its own app. A 15-minute recap is also a better place for a sponsor than a 20-second clip, simply because people stay longer. One warning: check your rights deal before you post anything long. In football, the rights to the live match, the highlights and the social clips are often sold separately, sometimes to different companies.
News
News is different in an interesting way. A news channel broadcasts for hours every day, and almost all of it disappears the moment it airs. Nobody goes back to watch what was on at 2pm. But "Tuesday in 20 minutes," posted at 8pm, with the Fed's rate decision, the Senate vote and the wildfire evacuations, is something people would watch. That's the Feature. The Reels are the moments that travel: the senator walking out mid-hearing, the first drone footage of the fire. Each one points back to the day's recap.
News makes most of its money from ads and sponsored segments, and a sponsored segment is priced on how many people watch it. Features doesn't pay you, but it adds viewers, and viewers are what you sell.
Streaming apps
Streaming apps are the case where the missing ad share matters least. A streaming app shouldn't post its episodes, because the episodes are what people pay for. But it can post everything around them. Say season 2 of your crime drama starts November 15. Post "Season 1 in 12 minutes" as the Feature: the murder, the three suspects, the twist in episode 8. Make the Reels the cliffhangers, like the last 40 seconds of episode 8. End the recap with one line: season 2 starts November 15, only on our app.
A streaming app never made money from views anyway. It makes money when someone subscribes. So every person who finishes that recap is a potential subscriber, and that's the whole point. We've seen this work with short clips alone. Stage, a regional streaming app we work with in India, went from 2 language channels to 5 with the same 4-person team, and added over 200M views a month.
Live streamers
Live streamers have a version of the news problem. Say a streamer goes live for five hours playing Mario Kart 8. The next day, almost nobody will watch all five. But a lot of people will watch "every blue shell disaster in 15 minutes." That's the Feature. The Reels are single moments: the blue shell that hit him 50 meters from the finish line, the race he won from 12th place. Each one points to the 15 minutes.
Streamers earn from sponsors and from their live audience, so the goal is simple: bring new people to the next stream, wherever it happens, on Twitch, Kick or YouTube.
Creators and podcasters
Creators and podcasters are the trickiest, because they already make long video and the obvious move is wrong. The obvious move is to upload the same 30-minute YouTube video to Instagram. But then the same people find the same video in two places, and your views split in half. Nobody gets a reason to watch twice.
The better move is to make a different version. Say you posted a 45-minute interview with a founder on YouTube. On Instagram, post "5 hiring mistakes that nearly killed her company," in 10 minutes. Or turn an hour-long podcast episode on sleep into "what to change tonight," in 12 minutes. Someone scrolling Instagram has 10 minutes, not 60, so you're making the right thing for that moment instead of a copy. The Reels are the best quotes, pointing to the short version. And at the end, one line: full episode on YouTube.
That makes money in two ways. Sponsors pay for your total audience, so views on Instagram add to what you can charge. And some of those viewers will go to YouTube, where you do earn ad share. Keep that last push gentle, though. Instagram built Features to keep people inside Instagram, and it has no reason to help a video that sends them away.
Everyone else
The same logic works for anyone else sitting on a lot of long video. A church can post "Sunday's sermon in 12 minutes." A professor can post "Lecture 4, supply and demand, in 15 minutes." A conference can post "the three best talks from day one." Ask the same two questions: what's the version people will actually sit through, and where do you make money once they've watched it?
The real bottleneck isn't content
If you went through all five, you probably noticed that the hard part is never the long video. Every company already has it. The hard part is everything you have to make from it.
Do the arithmetic for a sports channel that publishes 20 long videos a week. Each one now needs a recap and up to 8 clips.
Each clip has to be found, cut, captioned, sized and posted. That's a full-time editor doing nothing but clips, before anyone has touched the recaps.
And recaps are harder than clips. A clip is one moment. A recap means watching 90 minutes, deciding which ten moments tell the story, and putting them in an order that makes sense. Instagram says it will build a tool that cuts long videos into clips. That will help. But cutting clips was never the slow part.
So I suspect the companies that do well on Features won't be the ones with the best video. They'll be the ones who can turn the video they already have into the right pieces, quickly, every week, without hiring a room full of editors.
What to do before Features reaches you
The good news is you don't need Features to start. The work it rewards is work that pays off on Reels and YouTube today. Go through your long video and ask, for each piece, what version people would actually sit through. Decide where you make money once they've watched, because that tells you what the last line of every video should say. And start posting clips that point to your long video now, on YouTube or to your app. When Features opens to you, you won't be starting from zero. You'll just change where the clips point.