Facebook has just made a move to make TikTok ‘cry’: Launching the Reels short video feature globally, promising content creators will make a lot of money

The WSJ reports that Facebook’s parent company Meta has stepped up its counterattack against TikTok by rolling out the short video product Reels to all Facebook users globally on Tuesday. They also introduced many new features for advertisers.

In the business challenges facing the social media giant, Meta is in the midst of a fierce battle with TikTok, the most downloaded app in 2021 and overtaking Instagram in popularity of social media platforms. young users.

Meta has also been affected by the impact of a privacy feature introduced by Apple last year that disrupted the company’s digital advertising business. Since Meta’s February 2 earnings report, which highlighted these issues, the company’s market value has dropped by more than $300 billion.

During the earnings call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Reels has become Meta’s fastest-growing content format to date, even as he acknowledged TikTok as a formidable competitor.

Zuckerberg also noted that as more users spend time on Reels, they’ll spend less time on the Feed and Stories features — the formats that currently generate a lot of ad revenue for the company.

With the above announcement, Meta is taking steps to address these issues.

By expanding Facebook Reels globally, Meta will introduce its new content format to users in more than 150 countries. Meta will also begin testing new ads that run with Facebook Reels from all content creators in the US, Canada, and Mexico, as well as “more countries in the coming weeks,” the company said in a statement. blog post. The company also revealed it will introduce some new video creation and monetization features.

“We want Facebook Reels to be the best place for content creators to connect with their communities and make a living,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post Tuesday.

The company says video now accounts for more than half of the time users spend on Facebook and Instagram.

Meta introduced Reels in August 2020 to its Instagram users in the US as a company response to TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance.

In a note to investors, analyst Michael Nathanson on Thursday compared Meta’s efforts with Reels to the company’s successful shift to the Story feature in 2018. The format that a photo or video takes will disappear after 24 hours, which Snap Inc. pioneered but eventually proved popular among Meta users.

“We are encouraged by Facebook’s success with Story and believe it will also succeed in monetizing Reels,” Nathanson wrote.

Source: WSJ