Would you pay for a subscription on Instagram to follow someone?

A bit like the SuperFollow of Twitter, the subscription also arrives on Instagram. We can therefore decide to join one subscription to continue following the profiles we prefer, provided that these are closed in some way to subscribers only. The project was announced at the beginning of the year and then identified over the months within the beta versions of the application by various experts. Now we should be there: a much broader test phase, extended to large groups of creators, should start very soon will allow them to reserve exclusive content only for those who pay. For example, Stories visible only to those who will pay. Just like on Twitter.

The subscription on Instagram will start as always from the United States, even if – as happens more and more frequently also on other social platforms – the novelty could soon become operational in other markets as well. Meanwhile, Sensor Tower and Apptopia have identified the inclusion of the features in the US app to purchase an Instagram subscription. The price, at least in dollars, it should range from 0.99 cents to $ 4.99, obviously at the choice of the user who will propose his subscription package including exclusive content for those who are willing to pay. Until now, the only digital content that could be purchased was the badges to pay homage to the creator during the live shows to allow him to monetize.

Usually Instagram experiments with every new development in the pipeline with a small group of creators before eventually making it available on an international scale. In this case, it may take some time for all creators who meet a set of requirements to propose subscriptions, but these kinds of features are launching much faster than in the past. On the other hand, already the head of the platform controlled by Facebook, Adam Mosseri, had alluded to subscriptions as one of the three strategies available to the most active users and which generate the most following in order to be able to reward their commitment on the social network.

Times aside, which in any case are announced to be rather short, the underlying question is, if anything, philosophical: would we be willing, after years of gratuitousness, to pay perhaps small amounts but which together can make a difference, to follow the stories of any character? A pop star, a television celebrity, a journalist who is particularly attentive to certain issues. And yet influencers, comedians, entrepreneurs, actors and actresses, models and models, improvised phenomena who live only their own lives over the top on social media. Difficult to say and understand the magnitude of the operation. At the moment, it doesn’t actually look like the Twitter model has taken off, but it will take a while to figure that out. Meanwhile, Instagram also tries to put this possibility in the hands of creators: but the digital economy is already full of micro-items of expenditure that weigh on users’ budgets, from streaming subscriptions for TV series and videos to in-app purchases for the most popular video games to tariffs for cloud services. Do we really have room to pay for a creator’s stories?

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