Speaking on the Mixed Signals podcast hosted by Semafor’s Ben Smith and Max Tani, Mosseri explained that Instagram uses what he described as exploration-based ranking, a system that deliberately reserves impressions to test new and unproven content.
Mosseri compared the process to a competitive audition. The algorithm initially shows each post to a small audience and then expands its reach based on performance. He said it is “almost like a little competition where you reserve a certain number of impressions to try things out.”
“You try to get every piece of content or some subset of everything - if you can't get everything - you know, a hundred views, call it, and you see how they do. You graduate those to a thousand views, with another percentage of your impressions that you reserve for these auditions. And then for the things that do disproportionately well in that a thousand, you graduate again to call it ten thousand views, and so on and so forth,” Mosseri said.
This structure, he said, ensures that success is not limited to established creators with large followings.
“It's how you can see something from someone with 50 followers get millions of views in a couple hours because they just created something that happened to wildly outperform everything else that day,” Mosseri added.
“What is great about this is you allow new entrants to have hits, not just the sort of established largest names.”
When asked how Instagram’s approach compares with rivals like TikTok and YouTube, Mosseri said TikTok was among the first to lean heavily into exploration-based ranking, but that the model is now standard across major platforms, including Instagram, YouTube and Facebook.
He noted that TikTok has experimented extensively with features such as Stories and messaging, though with mixed results. “They have been trying to lean into stories more and more, and they have been leaning into messaging more and more,” Mosseri said, adding that TikTok has seen the most success with messaging.
Mosseri also pointed to a key difference in commerce strategy. He said TikTok has aggressively pursued a first-party commerce model, handling transactions directly on the platform.
“They are very quick. I want to give them a lot of credit for trying things and to be bold and to see what works and what does not,” Mosseri said. “But they are leading, and they have a different commerce strategy than us.”
He described TikTok’s shop tab as having transformed the app into something resembling an e-commerce marketplace.
“They are leaning a lot more into first-party commerce, facilitating the transactions themselves on the platform, taking on things like shipping,” Mosseri added. “I don't know if you have gotten to the shop tab on TikTok recently, but it's basically Amazon now.”
Mosseri also said TikTok is “very much applying lessons they’ve learned in China to the rest of the world.”
