Mark Zuckerberg faces an uphill battle in his quest to make Instagram the first video platform, as new internal documents reveal TikTok users spend more than 10 times as many hours on the platform as Instagram users spend on Reels.
According to a document, Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, which is less than a tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend scrolling on that network each day.
The document, reviewed by the Wall Street Journal, was released internally in August and showed that Reels’ engagement had fallen 13.6% over the past four weeks and that “most Reels users have zero engagement at all.”
Meta called the data on the viewing times outdated and not global, but declined to give the journal any other numbers.
New internal documents show that TikTok users spend more than 10 times as many hours on this platform as Instagram users do on Reels. Above: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
According to a document, Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours a day watching Reels, which is less than a tenth of the 197.8 million hours TikTok users spend scrolling on that network each day
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Meta spokeswoman Devi Narasimhan told the Journal. “But developers and businesses are seeing promising results and our monetization growth is faster than expected as more people than ever watch, create and connect through Reels.”
The Journal interviewed a creator named Landen Purifoy, 22, who compared his experiences of sharing the same video on multiple social media platforms.
Purifoy makes videos for TikTok and other platforms — many of which get millions of views on TikTok — of him using a device called a talkbox to make fun noises and music
Purifoy posted the same video on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Snapchat’s Spotlight, and Instagram Reels. It received millions of views on every platform except Instagram – where it hit less than 100,000.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” Meta spokeswoman Devi Narasimhan told the Journal. “But developers and businesses are seeing promising results, and our monetization growth is faster than expected as more people than ever watch, create and connect through Reels.”
In July this year, the company was forced to reverse a series of changes, including full-screen videos and photos, after users – including celebrities like Kylie Jenner – berated it for copying TikTok
“No one is going to create original content for Instagram,” Purifoy told the Journal. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Instagram announced a Creators’ Fund that is expected to pay out $1 billion by the end of this year.
The news comes at a challenging time for the California-based company, which launched Reels in August 2020 and said the new feature accounts for a fifth of the time people spend on Instagram.
In July of this year, the company was forced to revert a series of changes, including full-screen videos and photos, after users – including celebrities like the Kardashians – berated it for copying TikTok. A photographer named Tati Bruening started a petition that has garnered over 250,000 signatures to “make Instagram Instagram again”.
Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri told Casey Newton’s Platformer at the time that some of the changes will be phased out, but while the number of algorithmically recommended videos people see will be reduced, he says the number will increase again when that happens Company feels that technology has improved.
“I’m glad we took a risk – if we don’t fail every now and then, we’re not thinking big enough or bold enough,” Mosseri said. “But we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. [When] we learned a lot, then we come back with some new idea or iteration. So we’re going to work through that.’
TikTok is also gaining monthly active users on Instagram, with Instagram amassing 2 billion and TikTok already amassing 1 billion. However, across Meta’s entire family of apps — including Facebook and WhatsApp — the tech giant has at least 3.6 billion monthly active users.
Meta announced its first revenue decline in July as it grappled with an advertising slump and competition from companies like TikTok.
A few months earlier, Meta had asked its users to stop re-sharing TikTok videos on Reels to encourage more creators to create original content on its app. Instagram initially said it would de-rank watermarked clips from other platforms, including TikTok, in February 2021.
“TikTok is light years ahead of Reels,” said Evan Asano, CEO of influencer marketing agency Mediakix, citing TikTok’s powerful content recommendation system and the fact that the app is far more focused than Instagram’s.
TikTok is also gaining monthly active users on Instagram, with Instagram amassing 2 billion and TikTok already amassing 1 billion. However, across Meta’s entire family of apps — including Facebook and WhatsApp — the tech giant has at least 3.6 billion monthly active users