Nah its not doomsday…just a set-back.
A phone verification is really no big deal, other than that is takes time and the account is down for a while.
There is always a risk of the account getting banned though when it’s going through a PV, (we had a few being banned last week after the PV but got all but one back with photo verification).
I have read a lot of your posts @PortraitPhotography and I think we may have a similar mindset in the sense that we want to build for “stability”, “long-term” and with as little hassle as possible.
This is how I built all my online businesses since 1999, but I’m starting to think of Instagram differently lately.
I’m thinking of Instagram more as a “traffic platform” where I can get very cheap clicks compared to other advertising venues.
As long as I either build my email lists with these people and/or turn them into customers I am still getting huge value out of it, even if its annoying to lose some accounts here and there.
@Adnan has a great quote/saying on his profile:
“For every account they delete, create two new ones”.
If you think about how easy and cheap it is for us to create two new IG accounts and start posting on them, the power of that statement is incredible!
Basically, they can never win (unless they ban all of our accounts, and that’s just not happening at the moment).
Sorry to go off-topic here in my own thread, but I just feel that myself and many others are “overthinking it”. We just need to accept the rules of the game, be ready for it and take advantage of this amazing (almost) free traffic for as long as it’s available!