Recently, Instagram has started to resemble TikTok much more, but this radical transformation and a new emphasis on short-form video haven’t resulted in TikTok’s absurd audience figures.
A copy of an internal study paper dubbed “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022,” which was published in August, was reportedly seen by The Wall Street Journal on Monday. According to the analysis, Instagram users don’t spend a lot of time watching these brief videos, and to make matters worse, “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.”
Less than 17.6 million hours a day, according to The Journals, are spent by consumers watching Reels. Users of TikTok watch 197.8 million hours of short-form video every month, which is ten times more than users of Meta’s apps.
And the business is said to be at least partially to blame for the absence of content producers and influencers who use Reels. According to internal records cited by the Journal, just 2.3 million of the 11 million Instagram users who have been designated as producers in the U.S. publish content each month.
The survey also revealed that a third of all Reels still had the watermark from the original websites they were made on, particularly TikTok.
And yet, although the platform has paid Reels creators a total of $120 million thus far, that still falls well short of their projected total payouts of $1 billion by the end of this year, although that number may also not take into consideration payments to Facebook content creators.
A spokesman for Meta wrote the following in response to Gizmodo’s request for comment:
“This story presents an inaccurate image of our progress on Reels by relying on obsolete and, in some cases, inaccurate statistics. We still have more to do, but creators and companies are experiencing encouraging outcomes, and Reels is now used by more people than ever before. As a result, our monetization growth is faster than we anticipated.
Chief Operating Officer of Instagram Justin Osofsky told the newspaper that while they were seeing “strong potential in the deployment of reels,” there was still work to be done. According to Osofsky, reels make up more than half of the information in private communications.
Over the past two months, Meta crammed Reels into both Facebook and Instagram, and the rollout wasn’t quite seamless. Not all users were pleased with the social media sites’ attempts to replicate TikTok. Millions of people shared one viral campaign and the accompanying meme criticising platform changes, and celebrities like Kylie Jenner even reposted it.
