Key Takeaways
- Scott Galloway said Meta is coming for Alphabet’s YouTube, which he puts at 16% of TV viewing time, twice Netflix’s 8%.
- Instagram is now testing videos up to 90 minutes long on TV, and Meta’s reach and AI-driven algorithm give it a real shot at some of that viewing.
- Meta has failed at long-form video before, and it hasn’t said how it will share ad revenue with creators, which YouTube already does.
- Analysts expect Meta’s revenue to nearly double from 2025 to 2028, and the thing to watch is whether Instagram starts sharing ad revenue with long-form creators.
Meta Platforms (META) wants Instagram on your TV, and Scott Galloway thinks he knows whose viewers it’s after.
Last week, Instagram started testing “Features,” horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, with creators in Brazil and a small group in the US. Its app also landed on Apple TV, joining Amazon Fire TV, Google TV and Samsung sets.
Galloway’s read, on Monday’s episode of Prof G Markets:
“Mark Zuckerberg is the best thief of IP in history and he’s clearly coming for YouTube.”
That puts Meta up against Alphabet (GOOG) and YouTube, the biggest name in TV viewing by Galloway’s numbers. He put YouTube at 16% of all TV viewing, twice the 8% for Netflix (NFLX). He said the gap has “broadened dramatically” since YouTube sat in the low double digits and Netflix in the high single digits.
(As for the thief part, he has a point: Instagram Stories looked a lot like Snapchat’s, and Reels a lot like TikTok’s.)
The ad engine is humming already
Meta’s revenue topped $200 billion in 2025, and analysts expect it to keep climbing fast:
That’s $373 billion by 2028, nearly double 2025’s total. Features is a small test, so nothing in it should move those estimates yet.
Galloway’s argument is about what happens once it isn’t small.
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Meta has 3 billion users to point at it
With 3 billion users, Galloway expects Meta to tilt its algorithm to over-reward early adopters: the first 10,000 or so creators who put up a reasonable 60 minutes of content get pushed hard into feeds.
And he thinks that algorithm is better than it’s ever been:
“I believe the algorithm now at Instagram, courtesy of the CapEx and AI, is dangerously addictive.”
That spending is a big part of why Galloway picked Meta as AI’s big winner a week earlier. And Meta’s capex has more than tripled since 2021:
Management expects 2026 capex of $135 billion to $145 billion, including finance-lease principal. On the third-quarter call, management tied conversion gains of 1.4% to 9.6% to upgrades in its ad-ranking models, which run on that compute.
Meta has been here before
Meta has stumbled with long-form video before. Instagram launched IGTV, a separate app for longer videos, in 2018 and later scrapped it. Even Instagram head Adam Mosseri needed convincing this time. “For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram,” he said in the video announcing the test.
Then there’s the money. YouTube shares its ad revenue with creators (about half of it, by Galloway’s estimate), and Instagram hasn’t said it will. For now, it’s paying some creators directly.
Some creators will post anyway. Galloway said his own company plans to put long-form shows there and sell host-read ads inside them: “we’re going to go hard at this because we can embed ads in our content.”
And if Meta does decide to pay creators, it has the margins to do it:
That margin has slipped this year as AI spending climbs: excluding a legal charge, Meta’s third-quarter operating margin was 35.4%, against 40.1% a year earlier.
YouTube still has the lead
Alphabet won’t give up that 16% easily. Matt Strauss, Peacock’s president, whose company announced a deal with YouTube this summer, said on Monday’s episode of Decoder:
“YouTube has done an unbelievable job creating a platform and a business model that is allowing them to continue to grow. And I don’t see anything that would indicate that that’s going to slow down.”
I think Galloway’s right anyway. Meta is coming for YouTube, and with 3 billion users and an algorithm this good, I expect Instagram to win a real slice of TV time. It doesn’t need much of YouTube’s 16% to give its ad business a whole new screen to sell.
Of course, Features is still a test, and Instagram hasn’t said how long-form creators will get paid. The tell is whether it rolls out widely with an ad-revenue split that can stand next to YouTube’s.
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