For a decade, the growth playbook on social media rewarded volume. Post more, repurpose faster, ride every trend, and the algorithm would hand over reach. That arrangement is collapsing. Since April 2026, Instagram has applied its originality rules to photos and carousels as well as Reels, and accounts that lean too heavily on reposted content become ineligible for algorithmic recommendations entirely. The platform says 75% of its recommendations in the US now come from original posts. For creators, that turns a creative preference into a distribution requirement. For brands, it turns a vague quality signal into a hard commercial variable, because a creator with weak originality can no longer deliver anyone beyond their own follower list. Irem Gonc, who co-founded a platform that coaches creators and brands through their growth, argues the shift is less a policy change than a correction. AI and repost accounts have made content effectively infinite, and when supply is infinite, the only scarce asset left is a point of view.
What Originality Means Now
The word gets misused constantly, usually to mean “first.” Gonc rejects that framing. “Originality isn’t about being first to an idea. Almost nothing is truly new,” she says. “It’s about whether you’re adding a perspective that wasn’t there before.” The platforms, she points out, have landed in roughly the same place. Instagram counts content as original if someone wholly created it or if it reflects their unique perspective, and it accepts materially edited content, which means meme templates and popular clips remain fair game provided the creator adds something that enhances them. The test is not provenance. It is contribution.
That distinction matters because it kills the defensive excuse creators reach for when their reach drops. The problem is rarely that the format was borrowed. The problem is that nothing was added. Audiences register this faster than any ranking system does. “Audiences can feel the difference between someone recycling a trend and someone who actually has something to say about it,” Gonc says. What changed in the last year is that the platforms finally aligned their distribution with that instinct. The judgment viewers were already making privately is now being made mechanically, at scale, and attached to reach.
The Habits Behind A Recognizable Voice
Gonc sees three behaviors recur in creators who build a voice people can identify on sight, and none of them involve posting more. The first is refusal. Distinctive creators decline most trends and awareness days, asking a blunt question first: would the audience even notice if this were skipped? The second is repetition with variation. They keep a small set of recurring ideas and return to them from different angles until the thinking itself becomes the signature. Gonc gives creators a test for this. “If you removed your name from your content, would people still know it was yours?” Most cannot answer yes, which is diagnostic in itself.
The third habit is the one most creators get wrong, because it requires reading their own archive honestly. “They treat their own past content as data, not as a highlight reel,” Gonc says. That means looking at what people sent to a friend or saved rather than what collected likes, then building on those posts specifically. Likes measure approval. Sends and saves measure usefulness, and usefulness compounds. The common thread across all three habits is editorial discipline rather than output. “None of these habits is about posting more,” she says. “They’re about deciding more clearly.”
Scaling Without Losing The Quality That Worked
The failure mode for growing creators is predictable. More formats, more platforms, more partnerships, and somewhere in the expansion the voice thins out until the audience stops recognizing it. Gonc’s correction is structural. “Scale the system, not the self.” The creators who hold onto their voice build repeatable structures, such as a recurring series, a signature format, or a defined set of topics they own, around a fixed point of view. Volume then comes from going deeper rather than wider. The output grows while the perspective stays fixed, which is the opposite of what most growth advice recommends.
Brand deals apply the sharpest pressure, and Gonc locates the risk precisely. “A brand picks a creator because their audience trusts the way they talk, then sends a brief that removes exactly that.” Her guidance is to negotiate the boundary explicitly: agree that the product truth, the key message, and the disclosure cannot change, then protect everything else. Selectivity is the other half. “Every partnership that doesn’t fit your world costs you a little credibility, and credibility is the asset you’re actually monetizing.” That is a sentence worth sitting with, because it reframes a brand deal as a withdrawal against a balance rather than pure income.
How Brands Should Read A Creator Now
Evaluation practice has not caught up with the ranking changes. Most brands still screen on follower count and a handful of top-performing posts, which is exactly the wrong resolution. Gonc looks at patterns instead. What share of a creator’s last month is genuinely theirs? Do they have recurring ideas, or just recurring trends? How do they talk when nobody is paying them? She also reads the comments closely, asking whether people are responding to the creator’s take or merely to the clip. Her summary is the cleanest argument against vanity metrics available: “Follower count tells you how many people saw them once. Originality tells you whether those people will come back.”
The measurement shift behind this is already underway. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri explained in January 2025, in an Instagram Q&A shared on his account, that likes matter most for reaching existing followers, while sends become crucial for reaching new people, because shared content signals broader appeal and gets pushed into Instagram’s Explore feature and recommendations. Gonc’s read on what that means commercially is unsentimental. “A send is someone personally vouching for content to a friend. Nobody DMs an ad.” She expects three consequences: briefs written around shareable value rather than product shots with captions, reporting that moves toward sends and saves per reach because those show intent, and a tilt toward longer partnerships, since private recommendations are far easier to earn through a creator the audience already trusts. “The metric isn’t how many people saw it anymore. It’s how many people passed it on.”
Follow Irem Gonc on LinkedIn for more insights on creator strategy, originality, and brand partnerships.
