Reels makes up 20% of user time spent on Instagram, but hard to monetise: Zuckerberg

Reels is driving a majority of the engagement on Instagram, but these are hard to monetise for now, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He made the remarks during the company’s first quarter (Q1, 20220) earnings call. Reels is Instagram’s short-form video feature similar to rival TikTok. It now makes up more than 20 per cent of the time that people spend on the platform. The Meta CEO also added that video makes up 50 per cent of the time that people spend on Facebook, with Reels growing there as well.
Zuckerberg spoke about two key trends with Reels: the increasing popularity of short-form videos and the shift towards AI recommendations driving more of user feeds instead of social content. He added that more and more content on people’s feeds is coming from AI recommendations instead of social content i.e, content created the people and organisations that they follow on the platform.

Zuckerberg said that social content is “the most valuable, engaging and differentiated content for our services,” but also added how the ability to accurately recommend content from the entire platform will unlock “a large amount of interesting and useful videos and posts” that users would have otherwise missed.
But this shift in user attention also spells some problems for the company as it can’t yet monetise Reels as effectively as it does with the posts and stories.

However, Zuckerberg asserted that the company will figure out how to do so in the future, taking the example of the transition from the popularity of the desktop feed of Facebook to the mobile feed. According to him, even though mobile feed users were increasing rapidly at the time, the company hadn’t found a way to monetise at the time. But after a while, it became the cornerstone of the company’s business.
Meta will now be focusing on improving its discovery engine, he stressed. Meta is not the only company that is looking to monetise a service that competes with TikTok. Google Chief Business Officer Philipp Schindler told investors that YouTube is testing advertisements on its own short-video format, which is YouTube Shorts.