The time spent on Instagram increased by 24 per cent since Meta launched short-form video reels, a major challenger to ByteDance's TikTok. During the earnings call, Meta co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckeberg said that reels continue to become more social as people are resharing them more than two billion times per day. This has doubled over the last six months, Tech Insider reported.
Zuckerberg hailed the company's investments in artificial intelligence (AI) which helped in pushing reels videos to the users. He said that the investment in reel recommendations and ranking systems yielded a lot of results being witnessed across the discovery engine.
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Meta did not break down the daily active users for the Reels. IT said that the monthly active users on the company's lineup of apps rose by about five per cent year-on-year to over 380 crore. On the other hand, flagship social media platform Facebook witnessed a four per cent year-on-increase in daily active users to over 200 crore.
Meta chief financial officer Susan Li said although the company is not quantifying expected engagement growth but is ‘pleased’ with the incremental engagement. Li added that the results showed people value short-term video on the platform.
According to a Wall Street Journal report last September, Reels has been unable to capture the market share from its principal challenger TikTok. The reasons behind the poor show was attributed to ‘low levels’ of content creation. According to the report, most of the Reels got no engagement despite the presence of 11 million creators on the platform. The Meta spokesperson had disputed the WSJ report but said the company had a lot of work to do to keep Reels afloat.
Meta said it had narrowed its annual expenses forecast to between $86 billion and $90 billion, which is down from the $86 billion to $92 billion it had predicted in March.
The company also said its quarterly price per ad had decreased 17% from a year earlier, while it expects current-quarter revenue between $29.5 billion and $32 billion, compared with analysts' estimates of $29.53 billion, according to Refinitiv data.