Instagram’s attempt to take on TikTok cost the platform millions of dollars, countless App updates, and a small revolution led by the Kardashian sisters. Yet, despite all this, the platform has not yet managed to match its Chinese competitor – sad story, we could say -. An internal Meta document, obtained from The Wall Street Journal, reports that the Instagram Reels they are not having success with users at all. Or at least not as society would like, here is the truth.
Instagram Reels: the competition with TikTok wears out Meta’s social network
According to the data of the “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” report, users spend on TikTok an average of 197.8 million hours per day, and dedicate only 17.6 million hours per day at the Instagram Reels. And that’s not the only bad news for Meta. The report, released in August, states that user engagement in Reels is decreased by 13.6% in the last four weeks, and that “most of Reels’ users have no involvement”. The reason, apparently, would be the lack of originality of the published contents. Almost a third of the videos shared by users, in fact, are made using an external creator – well recognizable, by the way -. On the other hand, the problem of TikToks shared on Instagram has been affecting the platform for a while.
Aware of all these problems, Meta has allocated $ 1 billion for the creators of Facebook and Instagram, so as to entice them to produce them more content. To date, according to The Wall Street Journal, the creators of Instagram Reels have earned a total of $ 120 million. A figure that can be misleading, but which actually marks a success of the project. “We still have some work to do, but creators and companies are seeing promising results and our monetization growth is faster than we expected as more people are watching, creating and connecting through Reels,” says Meta spokesperson. Devi Narasimhan. Apparently, therefore, Instagram is trying to give another reading of the data released by the WSJ, even if the numbers speak for themselves: the percentage of Instagram users who believe that the company “takes care of them” has collapsed in the recent years, from 70% in 2019 to around 20% at the beginning of this summer. Blame the competition with TikTok? Let us say yes.