AI-Powered Reels: Meta reported an increase of 3% in revenue growth in the initial quarter of 2023. This was a turnaround from the trend of three straight quarters of declining revenue –Mark Zuckerberg credited an increase in engagement with Reels for a portion of the growth.
In an earnings conference this week, Zuckerberg said that time spent on Instagram was up by 24 percent since the company introduced its short-form video service Reels -an alternative to TikTok rival.
“Reels continue to be more social, with people sharing Reels over 2 billion times per day, and doubling in the past six months,” Zuckerberg said on the earnings call, according to the transcript.
Zuckerberg added a part of the company’s higher profits to AI and praised Meta’s AI investments to help deliver Reels videos to viewers.
“Our investments in ranking and recommendations has led to a number of the results we’re seeing today in our search engine discovery, Reels, and ads,” Zuckerberg said, according to the transcript.
The company didn’t break down the daily active users of their Reels product. However, Meta stated that the monthly active users of the company’s collection of apps increased by 5% over the course of the year to reach 3.8 billion. Facebook was meanwhile able to record an increase of 4 percent year-over-year in active users per day up to 2 billion, the company stated in its earnings report.
An analyst asked to provide an established benchmark for the growth in the amount of time spent on Reels, Meta CFO Susan Li stated that the company isn’t measuring “expected increases in user engagement” however they are “pleased” by”the “incremental engagement” that they’ve observed. Li stated that “it’s evident that people appreciate short-term videos” on Reels.
The Meta C-suite’s comments follow a rough journey for the company’s entry into Reels. The Wall Street Journal reported in September -using Internal documents provided by Meta – that the Reels launch had failed to gain market share from TikTok.
One of the main reasons for Reels falling was the low level in content production. There were about eleven million users on Reels however, the majority of Reels users experienced “no engagement at all,” per one of the Meta documents viewed in The Wall Street Journal.
A Meta spokesperson has disputed the Wall Street Journal’s article, however, they told Insider that Meta has “work to complete” for keeping Reels on the right track.
Meta reported revenue for the first quarter at $28.6 billion, an increase of 3% over the previous year. These results shattered FactSet analysts who had expected revenue at $27.7 billion, as per an article published by The Wall Street Journal. Meta also posted a net profit of $5.7 billion for the period, which is a 24% decrease from year-to-year partially due to its restructuring.
