Instagram has been reportedly struggling to attract the attention of the creators as its Reels (short-video) engagement has notably fallen against formidable competition which is coming from TikTok, a Chinese rival.
An internal Meta document which was accessed by The Wall Street Journal has revealed the data stating that the photo-sharing platform (Instagram) users are spending around 17.6 million hours on watching Reels every day, which is nowhere near TikTok's reach. It was stated that TikTok users spend around 197.8 million hours on the platform.
The report was published in August 2022, and has further stated that the Reels engagement had fallen by 13.6 per cent over the last four weeks (August-September), and "most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever".
What is the reason?
It has been stated that Instagram has struggled to recruit people who could make the right kind of content and the lack of original content on Reels.
As per the revealed document "Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the US, but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7 per cent, post on that platform each month."
A Meta spokesperson, however, said that Reels engagement currently is up on a month-to-month basis.
"We still have work to do. But creators and businesses are seeing promising results, and our monetisation growth is faster than we expected as more people are watching, creating and connecting through Reels than ever before," the company spokesperson added.
To attract people to make content for Instagram and Facebook, Meta has earmarked $1 billion for creator payouts through the end of the year.
Instagram Reels creators have received a total of $120 million till date.
Reports surfaced last month that threatened by the meteoric rise of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube have introduced new features to discourage their short-video app users from cross-platform sharing.
When creators now make a video on YouTube Shorts, they will not be able to download the video and cross-post it to other apps without a "YouTube watermark".
"If you're a creator who downloads your Shorts from YouTube Studio to share across other platforms, you'll now find a watermark added to your downloaded content," YouTube said in an update.
Inputs from IANS
