Meta says Reels now makes up over 20% of the time users spend on Instagram

During its Q1 earnings call, Meta stated that its short-form video feature, Reels, now makes up 20% of the time that people spend on the photo-sharing site. 50% of the time that users spend on Facebook is spent on video, according to the company. Although Meta didn't specify how much time is made up by Reels, it noted that they are doing well on Facebook.

The CEO of Meta said during the call that the company is optimistic about improving its short-form video product in the future, even though it doesn't monetize as well as Stories currently do. The company's experience with Stories, which at first wasn't monetized as well as the main feed, had improved over time. Meta expects to see a similar experience with monetizing Reels over time, but notes that it is still in the early days of ads in Reels, and that the company is still in the early days of ads.

Since starting Facebook 18 years ago, the company has seen multiple shifts in the media types that people use and that short-form video is only the latest iteration and is growing quickly. While Meta is seeing an increase in short-form video, it is also seeing a major shift in the advancement of artificial intelligence recommendations driving more of its feeds. Feeds are going to be recommended by artificial intelligence.

Being able to recommend content from the whole universe that you don't follow directly unlocks a lot of interesting and useful videos and posts that you might have otherwise missed.

It makes sense for Meta to focus on enhancing its own recommendation systems to get people to interact with Reels more, and in turn, be better aligned to compete with TikTok.

On the same day that it was revealed that it has started testing ads in YouTube shorts, Meta commented on Reels monetization. 30 billion views per day are generated by the platform, which is four times more than last year.

The success of TikTok has led to the creation of short-form video on both Meta and YouTube. Over the past few months, Meta has been looking to enhance Reels and has largely adopted several of TikTok's features to help it compete with the platform.

Facebook's quarterly earnings increased from 1.92 billion last quarter to 1.96 billion this quarter. Reality Labs lost over $10 billion last year and in the first quarter of this year.

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