At The Shade Room, the order is often different. We’re social-first. The conversation might begin with a post, a video, a quote, or something happening in the comments. Editorial can expand the context and give people a fuller understanding of the story. Video can capture the reaction, pursue the follow-up, or deliver an exclusive that takes the conversation somewhere new. Those teams aren’t working toward a single final destination. They’re building on what the audience is already responding to.
That’s why I think the familiar description of social media as a distribution channel misses so much of the business now. For a significant part of the audience, the feed isn’t where they discover a teaser for the real product. It’s where they experience the product.
Instagram wants the full video now. Sound familiar?
In late October 2026, Instagram began testing Features, a long-form format that lets select creators publish horizontal videos up to 90 minutes. The examples include interviews, podcasts, and other full-length programming. Instagram is also testing ways to connect clips back to those longer videos, while exploring creator payments. Social Media Today reported that some participating creators had been offered substantial one-time payments, citing Business Insider. This is a limited test, not a 90-minute upload option everyone has today.
And it isn’t Instagram’s first swing at longer video.
Remember IGTV? Instagram launched it in 2018 with videos up to an hour long. By 2021, Meta had merged IGTV and feed videos into Instagram Video; the separate IGTV app was later discontinued.
I actually had success with that era of Instagram video while working in radio. Using Instagram Live alongside IGTV gave content from the radio world another home and another viewing window. People didn’t have to be listening at the exact moment something happened to engage with it later. So I’m not dismissing longer video on Instagram simply because IGTV didn’t become the product Instagram hoped it would.
What interests me is the business motivation behind trying again.
If somebody discovers a two-minute clip from an interview on Instagram, why should their next step have to be opening YouTube to watch the other 45 minutes? That’s a valuable block of attention Instagram would rather keep. The same competitive question extends to podcasts and streaming entertainment. This looks like a play for more of the time people already spend watching video, not just another place to upload a file.
Of course, video length alone won’t make the strategy work. Creators need reasons to publish full programs there, including a sustainable way to earn from them. Audiences need good discovery, reliable playback, and an experience that makes sitting through a longer video feel natural. Instagram tried long-form once before; the economics and viewing habits still have to add up.
But the direction is clear: the platforms don’t want to be trailers for someone else’s destination. They want the whole show.
The audience didn’t wait for publishers to reorganize
The numbers explain why.
Across 48 markets, the Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found 54% of respondents used social media or video networks for news in the previous week, compared with 51% who used news organizations’ own websites or apps. Those groups overlap, so this isn’t a market-share comparison. It is evidence of where the news habit now lives.
In the U.S., Pew Research Center’s October 2026 research found that 40% of adults regularly get news on Facebook, 34% on YouTube, and 23% on Instagram. Pew also found that 46% of Instagram users regularly get news on Instagram. Those last two percentages have different denominators; both tell us something important about how news shows up within an app people opened for all kinds of reasons.
None of that means the website stopped mattering. It means a person can understand the headline, watch the relevant moment, share it, argue with somebody in the comments, and go on with their day without ever leaving Instagram. They still experienced a publisher’s work. They might have experienced the entire story they wanted from it.
If our only measure of that encounter is whether the person clicked a link, we’ll miss what actually happened.
Black audiences have been telling us this for years
Can we give Black folks their flowers before I bring in the charts?
A lot of what the internet eventually calls a trend—the language, the sounds, the memes, the reactions—was already moving through Black communities. By the time somebody puts it in a marketing deck and calls it a “cultural moment,” the group chat has often moved on. 😭
Black audiences aren’t just consuming the conversation. They’re creating it, shaping it, and helping decide what deserves attention. That’s something a social-first publisher like TSR can’t afford to miss. Sometimes the most important part of a story is what the audience says back to us: the question nobody answered, the detail people keep sharing, or the conversation that suddenly calls for a follow-up.
That’s why I want this part of the media conversation to get more attention. And the data gives us a few good reasons.
In Pew’s 2026 News Platform Fact Sheet, 62% of Black U.S. adults said they get news from social media at least sometimes, compared with 59% of U.S. adults overall. For Black adults, the share getting news from social media was the same as the share getting it from news websites or apps: 62% for each. And when asked about their preferred digital news platform, 23% of Black adults chose social media, compared with 14% who chose news websites or apps. These are different questions—use versus preference—but together they challenge the assumption that the publisher’s website is always the center of the experience.
Pew also reports that Black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans are more likely than White Americans to regularly get news on Instagram. It doesn’t follow that every Black person gets their news from Instagram, or from TSR specifically. What it does support is something we’ve seen in practice: for many people, accounts like The Shade Room and the creators they follow are part of their actual news routine, not a detour on the way to it.
There’s an equally important cultural layer.
In EMARKETER’s Black Consumers’ Digital Habits 2026 research deck, the researchers cite findings from The Shade Room × MAGNA Media Trials’ 2025 Cultural Capital study. Among surveyed U.S. Black social media users, 81% said brands should understand the culture, not just copy its style. 78% wanted brands to listen, respond, and be authentic, and another 78% wanted real conversations instead of brands simply talking at people. Those findings appear on page 11 of the EMARKETER deck.
The original TSR × MAGNA Cultural Capital study adds context: among its U.S. and U.K. general-population respondents, 66% said social media was where they usually discovered content or trends connected to Black culture, compared with 49% for television and 27% for online webpages. Those figures come from a different sample and measure cultural discovery, not news consumption. They’re useful precisely because they show another job social already does.
You can make a perfectly formatted post and still get the culture wrong. You can repeat a trend everyone recognizes and give the audience no reason to care that you posted it. For a social-first brand, cultural understanding isn’t a finishing touch. It’s editorial judgment. The comments, reactions, and conversations aren’t decoration around the story, either. They’re part of what makes the story worth following.
At TSR, the story can keep growing after the post
A social-first operation doesn’t have to stop at the first post. In fact, the best opportunities often begin there.
Sometimes editorial’s job is to add history or reporting that a social post couldn’t reasonably hold. Sometimes video has the chance to get the person at the center of the conversation on camera, capture a response, or produce a follow-up exclusive. Sometimes the comments reveal a question we hadn’t fully answered. And sometimes the post was exactly what the audience needed, and building five more pieces around it would just be adding noise.
One example from my own work is The Shade Room’s partnership with the Recording Academy around the 2026 Grammy nominations announcement. We had the opportunity to share exclusive category previews, including major R&B and rap categories, with an audience that already talks about those artists and those awards on social. The Shade Room’s coverage gave readers additional detail. The social experience let people react and discuss the nominations right where that conversation was happening.
According to our internal campaign reporting, the Instagram content generated 8.7 million-plus views and more than 240,000 interactions.
I don’t cite that campaign to argue that every partnership should stay on Instagram. Quite the opposite: it worked as a connected editorial opportunity in which the social post had value on its own and the expanded coverage had a different job. Someone could participate in the announcement without leaving the app. Someone who wanted more could go deeper.
That, to me, is a much better model than asking every audience member to follow the same path.
What does “social as the product” actually mean?
It doesn’t mean every social post has to contain every detail. It means the post should do a real job for the person consuming it, even if they never click through.
An Instagram carousel should explain its claim clearly enough to stand alone. A short-form interview clip should include the question or context necessary to understand the answer. A Facebook discussion should give people something substantive to react to, not just a headline stripped of the reporting that makes it meaningful. A YouTube video should reward the person who chose to watch it rather than spend its opening minute apologizing for the fact that it isn’t somewhere else.
The useful question becomes: What should someone get from this content in this environment?
That answer changes by platform. And the differences go well beyond cropping a video into vertical dimensions.
On TikTok, the opening needs to establish quickly why the story matters. On LinkedIn, the same topic may work better when the professional implication comes first. On Instagram, a creator or publisher might lead with the moment people will want to share with someone else. On YouTube, you may have permission to go deeper, provided the title and opening make a clear promise.
Also, let’s retire the idea that platform-native always means short-form. In YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s 2025 letter, the company said TV had become the leading device for U.S. YouTube viewing by watch time and that people watched more than one billion hours of YouTube on television screens daily. That’s a very different viewing context from a hurried phone scroll. The platform itself contains multiple viewing behaviors.
“Post it everywhere” can be an efficient distribution instruction. It is not, by itself, a creative strategy.
The social team has to move upstream
At TSR, social doesn’t have to wait until the end of a workflow to be considered. It’s where much of our work starts. But I’ve worked in more traditional media environments, too, and I know how late social expertise can enter the process.
The interview has already been shot. The headline has already been chosen. The campaign has already been approved. Then someone asks the social team to make it perform. At that point, you’re trying to solve a platform problem with an export button and a deadline.
If social is one of the primary places the audience experiences the brand, the people closest to that behavior need a voice earlier. They should be in conversations about the angle, format, talent, distribution plan and what success is supposed to look like. That’s an editorial and programming function, not simply a scheduling function.
I’m not arguing that social should run the entire company. I’m arguing that companies shouldn’t treat the audience’s primary experience as the final stage of production.
There’s another advantage to bringing social in early: the team is watching people respond all day. The comments identify confusion. Shares reveal what people want to pass along. Repeat questions can signal a missing explainer. Audience language can tell you more about whether an angle resonates than a meeting full of internal stakeholders.
Example: If a clip draws hundreds of variations of “Wait, what happened after that?” the next assignment may already be sitting in the comments. That’s not a guaranteed formula for a hit; it’s a better-informed editorial question.
The scorecards should reflect the experience
The metrics need the same sense of context. I want to know whether a Reel reached new people and whether it made them follow. I want to know if a longer video held attention and whether viewers returned for the next one. I want referral traffic when our goal is to bring someone to a deeper article or a direct relationship. For branded work, I want the outcomes we actually promised the partner—not a pile of unrelated numbers that happen to be large.
A useful evaluation is straightforward: What was this piece supposed to do? Did it do that? What did the audience tell us along the way? And what, if anything, should we make next?
The website still matters. It just has a different job.
None of this is an argument to give away the entire business to platforms we don’t own. I want publishers to have strong websites, searchable archives, newsletters, original programming, and direct ways to reach people. Platforms can change the rules tomorrow. We’ve all been around long enough to know that.
But I also don’t want to pretend that content only becomes valuable when someone leaves a social app. Editorial can offer depth. A website can preserve a story, expand it, and make it discoverable later. Video can bring the story to life in a completely different way. Social can be the reporting, the reaction, the community, and the first full encounter with the brand.
There isn’t one correct journey for every audience member, and there shouldn’t be one default definition of success.
For The Shade Room, social-first isn’t a pivot we need to make. It’s the foundation we’ve been building from. The rest of the media business has more reasons than ever to take that seriously.
The audience is already experiencing the product in the feed. The question is whether we’re building for that reality—or still treating it like promotion.
About the author
Ashley “AC” Trybula is an award-winning content and audience executive, journalist, and Head of Content at The Shade Room, where she leads social, editorial, and video strategy. Known professionally as AC and online as ACThePlug, she writes about audience development, content strategy, culture, media leadership, and the business of attention.
