Tech giant, Meta announced during its Q1 2022 profits call that its TikTok clone, Reels now makes up more than 20% of the time that users spend on Instagram. The corporation further noted that video, overall, makes up 50% of the time that users spend on Facebook. Although Meta didn’t mention how much of that time is made up by Reels, it stated that Reels are performing well on Facebook as well.
Short-Form Videos Such as Reels and TikToks Are on the Rise
Zuckerberg summarized that while Meta is noticing an upsurge in short-form video, it’s also observing a major change in the advancement of AI recommendations pushing more of its feeds, for both posts and its TikTok clone, Reels. He elaborated that feeds are going from being solely curated by users’ social circles to being suggested by AI.
“Being able to accurately recommend content from the whole universe that you don’t follow directly unlocks a large amount of interesting and useful videos and posts that you might have otherwise missed,” Zuckerberg stated. “The AI that we’re building is not just a recommendation system for short-form video, but a discovery engine that can show you all of the most interesting content that people have shared across our systems.”
YouTube is Testing Ads in its TikTok Clone ‘YouTube Shorts’
The company’s comments on its TikTok clone, Reels monetization come a day after Google announced that it has begun testing ads in YouTube Shorts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai also revealed that YouTube Shorts, the platform’s TikTok clone, is generating 30 billion views per day, which is four times more than last year.
Meta and YouTube’s short-form video efforts are a direct comeback to the success of TikTok, which has been established to be one of the world’s fastest-growing social media platforms. Meta has been exploring to further enhance Reels over the past few months and has mainly adopted several of TikTok’s features over time, including a Duet-like tool called Remix, to help it contest with the platform.
Read more: Instagram is Experimenting with Pinned Grid Posts
