Fb launches Reels worldwide, betting on ‘fastest growing’ format
By Nidz Godino
“Reels is already our fastest growing content format by far, and today we’re making it available to everyone on Facebook globally,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post Facebook is launching its short video feature reels to more than 150 countries in a move to expand its fastest growing content format.
The social media giant, which recently lost a third of its market value after a dismal earnings report, has highlighted Reels as a key priority.
Meta launched Reels on Instagram in 2020 and on Facebook in 2021 as its answer to explosively popular short-video app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech giant ByteDance.
The company, which says video now accounts for half of the time people spend on Facebook, also announced new ways for creators to make money through the Reels feature.
It said it was expanding its program to pay creators bonuses to more countries and was testing overlay ads using banners and stickers for creators to earn ad revenue. It would roll out full-screen ads between Reels soon.
Meta said during its latest earnings that it had faced hits from Apple Inc’s privacy changes to its operating system, which have made it harder for brands to target and measure their ads on Facebook and Instagram. It also cited macroeconomic issues like supply-chain disruptions.
The 18-year-old tech behemoth last month also warned it expects slowing revenue growth in the coming quarter due to increased competition for users’ time and shift of engagement toward features like Reels, which generate less revenue.
Meta would roll out updates for users to make and see Facebook Reels in new places, such as in its Stories feature, its Watch tab and at the top of the news feed. In some countries, users will also see suggested Reels in their feed.
Facebook announced its daily user numbers had fallen for the first time in its history, reopening the debate around its problem with attracting new, younger subscribers.
The firm’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was in no doubt who was to blame.
“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” he told investors, according to US media.
TikTok has continued its soaring growth, particularly among younger audiences attracted by its user-friendly controls and upbeat content of mostly very short, self-made videos.
“TikTok from the beginning has focused on a younger audience the style of the content, the music, the dancing,” Flavilla Fongang, runs London-based branding agency 3 Colours Rule said.
“Their moment has really come in pandemic, where people were desperately looking for ways to stay connected.”
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In the same time period, Facebook whose parent company has been renamed Meta has been battling regulatory issues, negative headlines around bullying and disinformation, and recently faced huge slide in its share price.
That said, Facebook remains the world’s most popular social media network by far.
It lost one million daily users in the last quarter of last year but still has almost 1.9 billion, figures that dwarf every other platform.
So does Facebook need to worry about attracting younger audiences, and can it do anything to remedy its image as platform for older generation?
The company itself clearly thinks so.
It has been focused on question for almost a decade, according to papers released last year by whistleblower Frances Haugen, some of which detailed the platform’s concerns about losing young audiences.
“Young adults perceive content as boring, misleading, and negative,” data scientists told Facebook bosses, according to an account from Haugen’s documents reported on The Verge website.
Yet up until this year, the platform had been able to post impressive growth figures.
Analysts say this was papering over the cracks.
“It’s not something that’s new, this migration of younger users away from core Facebook platform,” says analyst Matt Bailey from London-based Omdia group.
“It was making up for those lost users with older demographics… but it’s reached a bit of a saturation point among those older audiences.”
Facebook has been looking at TikTok’s rise with alarm and some jealousy.
The upstart app added 650,000 new users every day in the final quarter of last year, according to the We Are Social communications agency.
TikTok now has more than a billion active users, just four years after the hugely popular video-sharing app was launched by Chinese group ByteDance.
Already popular before the coronavirus pandemic mainly due to its viral choreography set to pop songs TikTok received major boost amid lockdowns, school closures and telecommuting.
The video platform has gained more than 300 million users since July 2020, the last time the company had reported user numbers.
Initially built on the principle of 15-second videos, the platform raised the time limit to 3 minutes in early July to attract wider audience and compete with YouTube.
For its part, the Google subsidiary launched YouTube Shorts, deployed in more than 100 countries in mid-July, to compete with TikTok in the short format segment.
The ByteDance subsidiary, whose equivalent in China is called Douyin, nevertheless remains well behind YouTube, which claimed 2.3 billion monthly active users in 2020.
TikTok is now looking to monetize more of its platform’s traffic, something it was slow to do in its early days.
The social network accelerated into advertising last year and launched a new feature in late August 2021 that allows its users to directly purchase products offered on the platform by content creators.
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