Hina Javed Malik
In the first quarter of 2023, Meta reported revenue growth of 3% year-over-year, reversing three consecutive quarters of revenue decline. Mark Zuckerberg attributes some of this growth to increased engagement in Reels.
Zuckerberg stated on a Wednesday earnings call that Instagram’s short-form video product Reels, which competes with TikTok, has increased time spent on the platform by 24%.
As per the record, Zuckerberg expressed on the income call, “Reels likewise keep on turning out to be more friendly with individuals re-sharing Reels multiple times consistently, multiplying throughout the course of recent months.”
Additionally, Zuckerberg lauded Meta’s AI investments for assisting in the delivery of Reels videos to users, and he attributed a portion of the company’s increased earnings to AI.
“Our interest in proposals and positioning frameworks has driven a great deal of the outcomes that we’re seeing today across our revelation motor, Reels, and promotions,” Zuckerberg said, per the record.
The company did not provide a breakdown of the product’s daily active users. Yet, Meta said that month-to-month dynamic clients on the organization’s group of applications rose by around 5% year-on-year to over 3.8 billion. Facebook, in the meantime, saw a 4% year-on-year expansion in day-to-day dynamic clients of over 2 billion, the organization said in its profit discharge.
Meta CFO Susan Li stated that the company is not evaluating “expected engagement growth” when asked if she had a benchmark for the increase in time spent on Reels. Despite this, they are “satisfied” with the “steady commitment” they have observed. That’s what Li added “Obviously people prefer to watch short-term videos” on the stage.
After a bumpy start to Meta’s venture into Reels, the C-suite has made these remarks. In September, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing internal Meta documents, that the Reels rollout was losing market share to TikTok.
The lack of content creation was one factor in Reels’ failure. According to one of the Meta documents seen by The Wall Street Journal, despite the fact that the platform had approximately 11 million creators at the time, the majority of Reels users received “no engagement whatsoever.
Revenues for the first quarter at Meta were $28.6 billion, up 3% from the previous year. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that these earnings exceeded the $27.7 billion in revenue that Fact Set analysts had anticipated. In addition, Meta reported a net profit of $5.7 billion in the quarter, a 24% decrease from the previous year, in part due to the restructuring of the business.
