I want to refine my position and explain myself a little bit better. I am not saying that if you were doing a post for a brand that that should be the only story that you do that entire day, I am saying that if you're doing a post for a brand and you're doing two story screens and you've done 20 that day, that you're probably doing that brand a disservice.

There's a balance of making sure that you are giving the brand the space and attention that they paid for without jeopardizing the performance of your feed on that day. I think as I said before, there's no magic number of what exactly is right, it's just I think asking yourself, "Do I feel like if I was the brand and I paid for this, would I feel happy with it? Would I feel like it was well-integrated into your day?"

That's another thing. It's not just how many or how few stories that you post that day in addition to your sponsor. For me, it's about how it integrates into the larger story of that day. I think as I said before, if it's like, "I'm at brunch," and then boom, "Here's a sponsored post," and then, I'm at meetings, or running around, or working out and it just goes on, then it does feel more like just a commercial where it shouldn't, it should feel engaging.

I think thinking about that-- If it's a skincare post, making sure you're doing it in the time that you would normally be doing your skincare routine, just being a little more considered about how you're integrating that brand into the day. Do I notice that the fewer stories you post, the worse they do? Not really.

Again, it's person-to-person. I think the thing that we are starting to track more and more is what is a person's average fall-off rate on their stories. If you did five stories in a day, how many views did you have in the first one versus the last one, which for us, is telling us how engaged your audience is. Are they getting to your stories and just being like, "No, don't like this person," and doing a hard swipe over to the next person, or do they sit and they watch every single one?

Another thing to think about as far as sponsored stories goes is that you need to think about how you are going to, again, create something effective for the brand and for your audience. If the brand is giving you a trackable link on your swipe up, what that should trigger in your brain is, they were going to look at how many people swipe up on this story. Let's just say, to keep the math simple, they paid you $2,000 for a post and 10 people swiped up on your post. Now they've paid $200 per visit. That is very expensive.

If you think about average Facebook click-through, let's say it's $2 a click, so if you were going to perform as well as Facebook, for that same $2,000, you should get a thousand visits. Now that would be pretty high for an influencer, but if someone's giving you a trackable link, know they are looking that and know they are looking at how you did versus everyone else in the campaign.

It's pretty hard to justify a price if I'm looking at the trackable link and saying, "Only 14 people swiped up and they have 100,000 followers." There's no one that's going to look at that and say like, "You did a great job." Think about your stories especially if they have a swipe up and ask yourself like, "How am I going to get people to flick their thumb up and check it out?," because your job is not to put the link in your story and hit publish, your job is to get people to swipe on it. I just think that, fundamentally, influencers misunderstand that.

They think, "My job is to hit publish on my Instagram post and to hit publish on my story, and that is it," and that is 100% not your job. Brands are paying you because they want the money they give you to turn into more money. If the money they pay you doesn't turn into more money, then they're never going to work with you again.

It is hard to track sales on Instagram, and I don't think Instagram is a good commerce platform in general, but looking at overall trends, if I'm a brand and I made a million dollars last year and I spent half a million dollars this year on influencers and I make a million dollars again, do you think I'm going to spend half a million dollars again the next year on influencers? No. That is existentially the biggest threat to this entire industry, is that this stuff stops working or it gets too expensive for it to be justified.

I think influencers, again, just fundamentally don't understand their larger role in advertising campaigns and what they need to be thinking about when they hit publish, which is, "How am I getting people to, one, go to this place and eventually buy this thing?"

Before you go and hit publish, you know how we always say like, "Ask yourself if this is going to be of benefit to your audience, is it going to educate them, inspire them, or entertain them?" Also ask yourself if this is a sponsored post, "Do I think I'm doing a good job of selling this, and is this the way I talked about this going to create some kind of action in my audience?" It is fundamental to your job. You're a salesperson, you're being paid to sell shit, and you need to be considering this.