Tavi breaks down her Instagram life into multiple acts. By the third act, Tavi was living in a fully paid luxury rental building in Brooklyn with a vague marketing agreement to feature the building during her year-long occupancy.
By the fourth act, Tavi had purposefully scaled her presence back. She also began to experiment and see just what Instagram's algorithm might favor when she did post.
"After noticing how few likes my posts of book excerpts or event fliers had gotten by comparison — like, so few that I thought people weren’t even seeing them — I tried using the platform to test out a theory I’d heard about Instagram’s algorithm while fundraising for Rookie: that it prioritizes faces and videos in people’s feeds over other types of content. (The feed isn’t chronological but is sorted by an invisible algorithmic hand.) This notion encapsulated my agony over the idea that being a face, a personal brand, was the most likely way to get one’s content seen on the oversaturated World Wide Web. I made a video of myself asking my followers to tell me where my video fell in their feeds, and many confirmed that they were seeing my new posts high in their feeds for the first time in months. They were divided on whether that was because Instagram explicitly favors certain types of data or because Instagram prioritizes, for each user, content similar to other content they’ve liked."In the end, Instagram invited Tavi to their offices to basically debunk her theories.
In summary, it is unclear how many more acts Tavi, or any other Instagram influencer will have. But more importantly, it is fascinating to see how each act is a new discovery of how social media can be monetized, exploited and leveraged never thought up before then.
Stay tuned for Act V......
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