• Talked about this a little before, touching it briefly, I don't think most people, when they look at Instagram because generally, it is a diversion, it is something that you look at for a minute or two at a time, I don't think most people come to Instagram with the purpose of shopping, which is different than blogs where you'd go to a URL and I think that you are more willing, ready and able to shop when you're on a desktop usually.

    You're there, you have logged in to all these shops, you're logged into Net-a-Porter, you're logged into Amazon, you're logged into Nordstrom, whatever it is that makes it very easy, the links are all there, there's not only links to the products they have but to five other options that are cheaper. Blogs are set up to get you to shop. There's also, you can search a blog, all these things that make it just quite a bit more actionable.

    Instagram is obviously chasing shopping, they're launching or have launched a stand-alone shopping app. A lot of times Instagram launches stand-alone apps and then tries to learn a thing or two about it in that stand-alone and then integrate that back into the app. We could see a world certainly where influencers can link directly to the posts in their Instagram and you can shop through there.

    I think that would make sense, I think that would be awesome for everyone, it won't be awesome for affiliate networks because they would scrub that affiliate out, that is something to consider. Instagram definitely wants to tackle shopping, they want to understand it, they want to have more people buying stuff on Instagram because Instagram is set up to do what? Sell advertising. If it is a lot easier to shop on their app, they're going to have the ability to sell a lot more ads.

    They will do anything in their power to sell more ads, that is the entire purpose of the company. I wouldn't delude myself that they're trying to do anything else other than sell advertising at this point, they will figure it out. The second question is with affiliates, I think we will see less and less affiliates on Instagram because I think Instagram will offer a native solution to be able to sell things. I'm not sure that they'll be paying influencers out for that but on the influencer's space, if it easier to buy things and if brands are seeing a huge amount of sales come through Instagram, that is great for all of you, that's great for all of us.

    It would be amazing to be able to have much more direct ROI of the sales on Instagram, it would be much easier to justify your prices, to justify working with you and to justify moving advertising away from more traditional mediums into Instagram. God willing, they'll launch something that works and we all get to make a lot more money, I don't know if I got that but no, I did.
    Episode #117
    - Building Audience Trust, Increasing Conversions, Travel Content