[thaumasiotes]

> expect Instagram to roll out a new system where influencers will need to pay for potential reach and Instagram will start making a lot of money.

This makes sense from the perspective of the relationship between, say, Kim Kardashian and Instagram. More reach is directly valuable to some people.

But it kind of falls down when you think about the ordinary customer base. A lot of people will want to follow Kim Kardashian. They may not have any other reason to use Instagram at all. But when they try to follow her account, it doesn't look good to show the message "you can't see Kim Kardashian's pictures, because 200,000 other people have already signed up to look at them. Try asking Kim to upgrade her account! (But no, you can't message her here.)"

Summary -- charging popular accounts for potential reach, as opposed to charging advertisers for pushed advertisements, can have strong negative effects on your user base, despite the fact that those users never wanted the reach. They did want their favorite popular accounts to be able to reach them.

[NullPrefix]

>you can't see Kim Kardashian's pictures, because 200,000 other people have already signed up to look at them. Try asking Kim to upgrade her account! (But no, you can't message her here.)

That is now how it works. People subscribe to more than one content producer which allows the aggregator the power to merge and reorder the individual streams. You do not pay for being displayed, you pay for being prioritized in the stream.