Yeah, this is not going to go down well with smaller creators on Instagram.
Over the past few weeks, you may have seen this notification pop-up in your IG feed (via Social Varsity):
Yes, Instagram has increased its follower requirements for live-streaming, which will mean that users who haven’t grown their account to a certain level will no longer be able to broadcast in the app.
Which will be a significant blow to many smaller creators who use IG Live for varying purpose, and have been able to connect to smaller groups via live-streams. Now, you’ll have to do video calls instead. Which, if you only have 1,000 followers, will probably work anyway, but that’ll also reduce any discoverability benefits that come from live-streaming on IG.
So why the change?
I asked Meta about the update, and it told me… nothing.
Meta didn’t get back to me with an explanation on the update, so I can only speculate on the possible reasons.
For one, live-streaming is expensive to support, and maybe Meta decided that it’s not worth paying to fund live-streams with only eight viewers. People can also use live-streams for less than savory purpose, by creating a new account, referring people to it, then broadcasting NSFW material. If it gets banned, so be it, and maybe, by increasing the threshold to 1,000 followers, that’ll eliminate those who may be looking to use its tools for this purpose.
It could also help to increase the quality of live-streams, by ensuring that only people with some sort of audience can broadcast. Like, you’re less likely to be a full kook if you have at least a thousand people following you, and maybe, that could then increase the overall perception of streaming as a medium.
The change also brings IG more into line with the live-streaming requirements of other platforms. On TikTok, users also need to have 1,000 followers to be able to live-stream, while YouTubers need at least 50 subscribers, which, considering the viewer-to-subscriber ratio, is probably about the same thing.
YouTube also recently increased the age limit of live-streaming in the app to 16, the same age restriction that IG implemented back in April.
So there’s been broader action on live-streaming in general, for seemingly various reasons, and this is just another update along the same lines.
Which, again, is bad news for smaller creators, but maybe you’ll just have to put more time into building an audience before you broadcast.
