Aubrium Blog
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56 articles
Does paying for verification actually boost your reach?
The platforms made big claims about what a checkmark does for you. We read what they actually published, found the one randomized test that ran, and isolated what nobody can verify.
Trial Reels is a free A/B test and nobody uses it as one
Instagram hands you a randomized exposure experiment with metrics at 24 hours. The internet treats it as a growth hack instead of the measurement tool it actually is.
Trending audio on Instagram: the most repeated myth in the creator economy
Every creator is told to chase trending sounds. The Reels system card lists audio signals, but they measure whether you engage with audio, not whether the audio itself is popular.
The cover is the real hook: thumbnail and first-slide science
Before your video plays, one image decides whether anyone clicks. YouTube publishes the numbers, and its own testing tool optimises for something other than the click.
The thousand-model machine, explained for humans
Meta's engineers describe over 1,000 models, two-tower networks, and a funnel that narrows billions of posts to hundreds. Here is what that actually means.
The minus sign — what Instagram scores against you
Meta's 2023 engineering post prints the scoring formula. The "see less" term is subtracted. Every system card lists predictions nobody talks about.
Who engages matters more than how many
A study of 54 million invitations found that five signals from five separate corners of your life beat five from one clique. The catch: it measured website sign-ups, not Instagram reach.
Stories is not Feed, and almost nobody researches it
Every guide is about Reels and Feed. Stories runs on a different system with different signals, and it is the one surface built to reach people who already follow you.
A 61-million-person experiment on whether social proof changes behavior
One experiment on 61 million people found that seeing which specific friends had already acted made people act too. A counter on its own did nothing. The hardest evidence we have that real social proof moves behavior.
