Mark Zuckerberg recently expressed thanks to AI-powered Reels for helping Facebook’s Instagram platform deliver impressive financial results in the first quarter of 2023, with the app’s time spent by users increasing by 24%.
Meta, the company behind Instagram, reported a 3% year-on-year revenue growth, marking a turnaround after the platform had, for three consecutive quarters, reported a decline in revenues. On an earnings call on Wednesday, Zuckerberg made it known that time spent on Instagram had risen, largely due to the company’s Reels rollout, which served as a TikTok challenger.
Zuckerberg went on to credit AI for helping to make Reels a success on the platform, expressing his gratitude for the investments Meta had made in regards to AI for providing users with personalized recommendations, as well as for short-form videos. Whilst we don’t know what amount of daily users Reels had specifically garnered for the platform, Meta stated that the total number of monthly active users for its family of apps was over 3.8 billion and that the daily active users for Facebook had reached 2 billion.
It turns out though that the launch of Reels was not quite smooth sailing. A report from The Wall Street Journal in September basing itself off of internal Meta documents, detailed that whilst there were a few million content creators on the platform, most of them received no engagement whatsoever. After being called out, Meta spokespersons agreed that there was still work to do in terms of keeping Reels afloat.
As for the financial results, Meta made $28.6 billion in revenues and $5.7 billion in profit, 24% less than the previous year, which they attributed to company restructuring costs. In response to analyst questioning, Meta CFO Susan Li commented that although they weren’t able to quantify “expected engagement growth”, they had noticed “incremental engagement” for Reels and that it was clear people valued short-form video on the platform.
Meta is a digital media and technology service giant that was founded in 2004. It has since gone on to become one of the world’s largest social media platforms, with over 3 trillion users and a wealth of content tailored to their interests. Initially created as a photo-sharing app, it has since grown to include functions such as messaging, streaming and even shopping.
Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder and CEO of Meta. Originally a Harvard undergraduate computer science student, Zuckerberg successfully launched the platform in 2004 and helped bring it to its current status. With his savvy vision and foresight, he has been an integral part of the massive success of Meta over the years.
