The problem here is that there’s a limited pool of consumers (and thus money) for this content.
It used to be that the aforementioned magazines were sufficient to fill that gap of the market; as a result they were making decent money, could put out decent content that people were happy with and didn’t have to resort to scammy behaviour to make profit.
Nowadays the floodgates are open and everyone is a wannabe “influencer” except the pool of consumers & money remained the same, so they now have to resort to less than acceptable techniques to try and make money, and this article is one of the possible outcomes.
Text on the internet has the same problem by the way - there’s now a shit ton of garbage content written only to gain clicks and attention without actually delivering any value to the reader.
I agree that free distribution and approximately infinite supply have been a problem for many content businesses that based their businesses on scarcity. But as far as I can tell the topic here is whether Instagram content is valuable. It is. Many valuable things can be hard to monetize. E.g., air.
