It was one and a half years ago that we addressed the relationship between Instagram and the Armenian press. Returning to the topic, let’s try to understand how the situation is now.

In the realm of Instagram, a lot has changed. It has managed to become one of the leading platforms in Armenia. If in the first half of the last year Instagram was in 26th place in terms of the number of visits from Armenia, it is now already in 11th place.  

Throughout the world, the media is actively using Instagram, because not only is the audience large (and continues to grow), but it also has a more active and youthful audience. However, for the most part, the Armenian press has not found an effective way to work with the audience of this platform.

If we compare the previous period of research with today’s data, we will see that Bravo.am has had a reasonable growth, increasing from 2000 subscribers to 12 000.

But, for example, Panarmenian Photo has increased its subscribers from 320 to 2800. Armenpress went from 200 subscribers to 330. And Photolure went from 520 subscribers to 1230.

Although during this period, Instagram’s audience increased immensely. And also during this time Electric Yerevan took place, as well as the war in April, the visit from the Pope, the events of Sasna Dzrer (Daredevils of Sasun) and others, which brought a lot of attention from the Armenian audience, as well as from the entire world.

It is clear that the aforementioned media and photo agencies have worked remarkably during those events, but they were not able to gather an audience on this platform.

And these are still positive examples, on the basis of which growth rates can be discussed. But Armenian social networks often have a different issue – accounts are created, frozen, and remain like monuments. The accounts of Shant TV and Civilnet froze, and have remained frozen.

The other issue is “lazy” updates, where the quickest rate of publishing a photo is once a week. This is the way that two of Armenia’s most-read websites work, News.am Photo and 1in.am, by posting updates once a week, which for social networking is a very slow rate (the main account for News.am has already not updated its account for over a year). Blognews and Tert.am have mulitple accounts, but those accounts have the same story.

In every case, Instagram is updated “with hands”, when there is free time. The exceptions are, for example, Public TV, which keeps its page active and has over 7000 followers.

It is understandable that Instagram does not have Facebook’s traffic capabilities, and every published picture will not immediately lead to a thousand website visits. Simply put, Instagram has other features, here is it possible to work in a more serious manner on a media brand, on recognizability. We are reaching that very slowly.

So slowly, that by the time we reach that, Instagram may already be closed.

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.