Over the past 3-5 days we’ve noticed a significant decrease in story views on our accounts as well as clients, and had a feeling Instagram was up to something, so we launched tests to gauge what exactly is going on.

We first created models in our platform aimed at detecting language around Instagram story views being down then sucked in hundreds of thousands of data points from Instagram, Reddit, Twitter and other sources (TV/radio, etc.) to gather feedback from boots on the ground (humans), and ultimately used all of the information to form an understanding of the big picture.

Instagram is on a mission to improve user experiences and as part of that they’re testing new algorithms, which makes sense, but unfortunately the recent rollout is doing more harm than good.

We believe story views will stabilize over the next week and there’s no reason to fear, but in the meantime it sucks.

More to come; stay tuned.