Meta says it’s moving away from feeds dominated by content from accounts a user is following to an “AI that recommends content you’ll find interesting from Facebook or Instagram, even if you don’t follow those creators,” Zuckerberg said. . “Reels is one part of this trend that focuses on the growth of short-form video as a content format, but this general AI trend is much broader and covers all types of content, including text, images, links , group content, and more. . Building a recommendation system across all these types of content is something we’re uniquely focused on.” The running rate on Reels has now reached $1 billion.
Meta blamed its sales decline on a slowdown in advertising revenue growth. Pivot to Reels is making it difficult for advertisers to advertise on Instagram, analysts say. “To monetize Reels, you’re asking advertisers to create new ones ads,” says Mark Shmulik, senior analyst at consultancy Bernstein, adding that advertisers will be slower to embrace Reels as it requires them to break away from old advertising habits and transform their original content into video content . The challenge becomes ensuring that “consumers engage with ads in that format in the same way that consumers have already engaged with news feeds and stories.”
The video could be “where is the world going”
Instagram is facing tough competition from TikTok. “TikTok has been the fastest growing social media platform GWI has ever seen, not only in terms of user base, but also in terms of users saying it’s their favorite platform,” says Birra e GWI. Increasingly, viewing “funny” content (mostly associated with short-form videos) is the number one reason for visiting social media across platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, he says.
Creators think Instagram’s changes are a tension between the old and new guard of Instagram users, but Beer says there’s actually a lot of overlap: 72 percent of Instagram users who log in primarily to share photos also say they use Instagram to consume funny content (which is more related to Reels), according to GWI. “More people go to Instagram for ‘trendy’ content than any other platform, but ‘funny’ content is still the most desired.”
Whether on Instagram or TikTok, static content is no longer the priority as creative marketing agencies like Billion Dollar Boy, which produces between 4,000 and 6,000 branded content ads per month, are moving towards more motion-based content. “For a long time, Reels has been what we’ve promoted as a business a lot because the success and performance is so much better than other types of content,” says CEO and founder Edward East.
