Statistics show that short videos on Instagram are less than satisfactory

Instagram has been working hard to develop its short video project Reels for several months, but according to an internal report, the development of short video functions is tending to stagnate, and Instagram wants to weaken the competition. The market share of rival TikTok still has a long way to go.

The documents show that the platform has about 11 million U.S. creators, but only about 20.7% of those users post on the platform every month. Engagement among Reels users has dropped 13.6% over the past four weeks, with most users not seeing any engagement.

In addition, Instagram users cumulatively spend 17.6 million hours per day watching Reels short videos, which is less than one-tenth of TikTok users' 197.8 million hours per day. One of the key reasons is that Instagram has struggled to recruit the right content producers and the lack of original content on Reels. To entice people to create content for Instagram and Facebook, Meta has earmarked $1 billion in creator bonuses through the end of the year, and Instagram Reels creators have received a total of $120 million so far.