Instagram Reels nowhere near TikTok in short-form video space

Meta-owned Instagram is struggling to woo creators as its short-video making Reels engagement falls against a formidable competition that is coming from its Chinese rival TikTok.

An internal Meta document accessed by The Wall Street Journal shows that Instagram users are spending 17.6 million hours watching Reels daily — less than a tenth when compared to 197.8 million hours users spend on TikTok a day.

The report, published in August, claimed that Reels engagement had fallen 13.6 per cent over the last four weeks, and “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever”.

Among the key reasons is that Instagram has struggled to recruit people to make the right kind of content and the lack of original content on Reels.