Instagram has a reel problem

A smart man once said: You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become TikTok. We’re paraphrasing, but that does raise a question: what if the pivot to video doesn’t work?

According to an internal doc from August titled “Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022” that was shared with the WSJ, Instagram users cumulatively are spending 17.6 million hours/day watching Reels – less than one-tenth of the time TikTok users spend on the platform daily.

♻️ Driving the data… a lack of original content, aka a reason to open it above everything else. Nearly a third of all Reels are created elsewhere, then uploaded to Instagram. The recycled videos (often containing a TikTok watermark) have become such an issue, Insta has publicly stated that it down-ranks any watermarked post.

• Roughly 11 million creators are on the platform in the US, but only about 2.3 million of them, or 20.7%, post a Reel each month.
• Engagement has also been falling, down 13.6% over the previous four weeks. And according to the docs, “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.”

📉 Big picture: Meta spokesperson Devi Narasimhan told Insider yesterday, "[The WSJ] uses outdated and, in some cases, incorrect data to paint a false picture of our progress on Reels.”

But regardless of whether that’s true, the company appears to be searching for a boost somewhere – it’s had a tough year. Meta reported its first-ever decline in revenue this past July, partly due to Apple’s iOS changes that impacted user targeting (resulting in advertisers paying the same amount of $, or sometimes more, for decreasing performance). Toss in the rise of TikTok, and it starts to make sense why Meta’s market value has dropped $620+ billion since peaking a year ago.

🤔💭 Thought bubble: Does the market (aka ppl like us) actually want Instagram to become more like TikTok? Hit that reply button and let us know your thoughts.