📱 Reels 1, TikTok 0
How Instagram's Reels is driving India's creator growth
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The Big Story
Remember when TikTok was banned a year ago, along with several other Chinese apps? The result was absolute chaos as around 200 million people instantly lost access to the app, including thousands of influencers who heavily relied on the app for their outreach. Since then began the search for the next TikTok. But it was short-lived because just one month later, Instagram launched Reels, and almost everyone moved to its app.
The Facebook-owned company released the feature in hopes of claiming the bite-sized vertical video content throne. And so far, it's achieving that goal quite successfully: around 6 million short-form videos were uploaded on average every day by Reels users in India. Comparing this growth with other players in the country, including Sharechat's Moj, Dailyhunt's Josh, InMobi Group's Roposo, and Times Group's MX TakaTak, the company was way, way ahead. The closest one was Moj, which reported 2.5 million uploads per day.
One key factor that helped Reels gain that initial traction was cross-selling.
Facebook's user base in India: 340 million
Instagram's user base in India: 210 million
By cross-selling Reels on the Facebook app, the company was able to get more users on board. On Facebook, people could view and share Reels, but if they wanted to follow the account, they had to download Instagram. The strategy also helped Instagram multiply its growth in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, where Facebook has a strong foothold.
But how did they do it? Reels have a relatively small team of 60 members in India, spread across content, partnerships, and policy. While the content team focused on trends and hashtag-driven topics, the partnership team focused on liaising with influencers and Bollywood celebrities to pull their fanbase to the platform. Meanwhile, the policy team converged on content moderation after its parent firm faced numerous controversies over fake news, election interference, and misinformation.
Since its inception in 2010, Instagram has consistently shown its dynamicity -
Successfully incorporated Snapchat's Stories format on the app in 2016.
Signed contracts with influencers and pumped up its user growth.
Launched Reels Remix, similar to TikTok Duet, which helps users make a reaction clip to another video.
These efforts seem to have paid off as Reels were everywhere, on users' Stories, Discover page, user feeds. However, Instagram is yet to tap on the monetisation for Reels. While the company launched Reels Ads two months ago, it first plans to get the experience right as big brands like Samsung, Oyo, Myntra, and Netflix, continue to double down their Reels content.
But Instagram is just getting started. The company is now planning to tackle its biggest competitor yet: YouTube. After launching IGTV in 2018, which allowed users to upload videos for upto one hour, Instagram is now coming for YouTube Shorts, a feature that lets you record video shorts for upto 60 seconds. Google launched the feature in India in September 2020, and it crossed 15 billion daily views globally. Considering that YouTube has around 450 million users in India, 2X that of Instagram, it's going to be interesting to see how Instagram hopes to claim the short-form video throne.
Check out the latest Reels trend report:
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