Instagram is going long, but will audiences stick around?

For years, social media platforms have been racing to make videos shorter, snappier and harder to scroll past. Now, Instagram wants creators and audiences to stick around for much longer.

The platform is testing "Features", a new format that allows creators to upload videos of up to 90 minutes, giving them more room to tell longer stories to communities they have already built on Instagram. The move marks a notable shift after years of platforms aggressively chasing short-form video and puts Instagram more directly into YouTube's long-held territory.

But getting creators to go long is one thing. Convincing them to do it on Instagram is another. YouTube has spent years building a long-form ecosystem, complete with an established monetisation model that allows creators to earn directly from their content.

So, what does Instagram see that makes long-form worth another shot, and what could persuade creators and brands to choose Features over YouTube?

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For social media experts, one of the answers may already be hiding in the way people use Instagram today. Reels has become a powerful discovery engine for creators, but when a short clip leaves viewers wanting more, the full podcast, interview or video often lives somewhere else.

Wei Sian Soh, marketing lead at Kobe, said Instagram may have spotted an opportunity to close that gap. A short clip can spark deeper interest in a creator, he explained, but audiences currently have to leave Instagram to satisfy that curiosity.

"You might arrive for a particular topic, then stay because you enjoy how that creator thinks or tells a story," said Soh.

The ability to link multiple Reels to a longer video could make that journey even more deliberate. Different clips from the same piece of content could appeal to different audiences, effectively giving creators multiple entry points into the same long-form video.

Cheryl Teng, strategy director (consulting) at VaynerMedia APAC, similarly sees Features less as evidence that audiences suddenly want everything longer and more as Instagram giving users somewhere to go when short-form content sparks deeper interest.

"We've all watched part of an interview and thought, 'Where's the rest?'" she said. "So this isn't necessarily about everyone wanting longer videos. It's about giving people the option to go deeper into something they already care about."

Instagram's community advantage

Yet Instagram's biggest advantage may not be its ability to compete with YouTube on long-form viewing, but the community it already has.

For Teng, framing the development as an Instagram-versus-YouTube battle misses the point. For creators and brands with established Instagram communities, Features could sit alongside YouTube rather than replace it, particularly when parts of their Instagram audience do not follow them elsewhere.

That existing community could be one of Instagram's strongest cards.

"Most of the brands we work with have spent years building their community on Instagram. Rebuilding that on YouTube from zero is slow and expensive," said Shermaine Wong, founder and CEO of Cult Creative. "Long-form here lets them go deeper with people who already care."

Wong drew a distinction between the behaviours surrounding the two platforms:

YouTube is where you go to watch. Instagram is where you go to talk about what you watched.

Instagram's ecosystem of DMs, saves and sharing between friends could therefore give long-form content a different kind of distribution, built around social interaction rather than primarily search and viewing intent.

For brands, the longer runtime could create space for formats that are difficult to squeeze into a Reel, from product demonstrations and expert conversations to recurring programmes. But simply having more minutes to play with does not mean brands should fill them.

"The risk is brands treating this as more ad space," Wong said. "Stretch a 30-second ad into five minutes and you get five minutes of people scrolling past."

Instead, she argued that long-form places greater weight on creators who can genuinely sustain attention, from storytellers to cinematographers, requiring brands to rethink not just what they make but who they work with.

For Instagram, keeping that journey under one roof also has an obvious commercial upside. Kristian Olsen, managing director at Type A, said the move sees Instagram pushing into YouTube's territory while reducing the reasons for audiences to leave its ecosystem.

The more attention Instagram can capture and retain, the more valuable it becomes to advertisers.

If audiences begin spending more time consuming longer content on Instagram, Olsen said brands are likely to respond by creating more content for the platform and putting more media dollars behind reaching those users.

Will anyone actually tune in? 

Instagram's community may give it a reason to pursue long-form video, but it does not guarantee audiences will embrace it. The platform must still change what people expect to do when they open the app.

Kobe's Soh cautioned that enjoying a 30-second clip does not necessarily mean someone wants to sit through the entire conversation it came from. The more meaningful test, he said, will be whether Instagram can develop a genuine long-form viewing habit and get audiences to watch those videos through.

Olsen agreed, pointing to a two-sided challenge: Instagram must convince creators that longer videos are worth producing while simultaneously convincing audiences to stick around long enough to consume them.

Even if audiences follow, there remains another question Instagram will eventually have to answer: money.

YouTube's established revenue-sharing model gives creators a clear financial reason to publish long-form content there. Instagram's creator economy, by contrast, remains more heavily reliant on brand partnerships and other monetisation tools.

"Extra views aren't automatically extra income," Teng said, adding that creators will have to weigh the economics of investing additional resources into the format.

For now, that could make Features less of an immediate shift in content strategy and more of an opportunity to experiment with what audiences are actually willing to watch.

Teng suggested brands start by repackaging strong existing content for Instagram, before using audience response and business results to gauge whether further investment is worthwhile. While requests for full interviews or deeper explanations may signal interest, she cautioned that they do not necessarily translate into sustained viewing:

If only the platform wants it, that's not enough. We need a reason for the audience and a reason for the business too.

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