Leaked Meta Document: TikTok Is Used Ten Times More Than Instagram Reels

Instagram users watch 17.6 million hours of Reels videos every day. This is not even a tenth of what TikTok achieves, according to internal Meta documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Reels counts as Meta’s TikTok competitor.

TikTok users spend an average of 197.8 million hours on the platform every day, Meta . writes according to The Wall Street Journal. Thus, compared to TikTok, Reels users spend 8.9 percent of TikTok users’ time on the Instagram platform. In the leaked document, Meta goes on to say that engagement had fallen 13.6 percent in the previous four weeks and that “most Reels users have no engagement at all.” Engagement means the interaction that users have with a video, such as whether they share or like a video, or leave a comment.

The internal Meta document is called Creators x Reels State of the Union 2022 and was published by Meta last August. According to this document, the lack of original videos is a major problem for Reels. Nearly a third of all content is created on another platform, with, for example, a watermark giving it away. To counter this, Instagram, for example, has been giving original Reels a higher ranking for some time.

In addition, Meta wants to give a billion dollars to content creators over the period from July last year to the end of this year to entice them to create unique videos and other content for Meta platforms. Instagram Reels creators have received $120 million from this so far, according to the leaked document.

Meta says in a response to The Verge that the aforementioned viewing figures are not current and not worldwide, and are no more than a ‘snapshot’. The company acknowledges that it still has work to do, but that monetization is higher than expected. The Reels engagement would actually rise instead of falling each month, and the $120 million creator payout would also be inaccurate. However, the Meta spokesperson did not want to give any new figures or information.