Instagram launches IGTV (vertical videos platform)

I follow mostly professional photographers on Instagram and vertical is extremely rare orientation for a classically trained photographer. Portraits and sports are probably the exception. Newspaper photographers too, based on the assignment and layout of the paper.

Somewhere in the least year or two, social media "experts" and influencers started ranting about how "vertical gets more interaction and clicks on Facebook because of mobile viewers" and that spread over to Instagram. I don't buy it.

Maybe when the iPhone was tiny the real estate had a bigger impact. But social media stats are starting to seem more and more like a sham to me.

Paper is a vertical format by default, yet we choose to change it's orientation to match the camera for print, not make the camera match paper (in most cases).

It's extremely interesting to me though. An entire market of people that want less of a sense of place, more of their own torso, by using a camera in a way it wasn't designed so they can publish to a temporary medium in a low resolution that will probably be gone in X years time.