If you see more and more Reels on Facebook or Instagram, you are not the only one. The battle for vertical video began very unfavorably for Meta, but everything seems to indicate that the numbers are picking up and Zuckerberg’s company is increasingly happy with the increasing time that users spend on its vertical video platform.
TikTok is the undoubted king, but Meta wants to catch up and soon. That’s why the company has been investing larger sums of money in its artificial intelligence engine, which, among other things, decides what video users watch next. The Wall Street Journal has had access to internal documents that show that Meta, in addition to being satisfied with the results in the short term, has noticed that people are increasingly eager to consume vertical videos on Facebook, not Instagram.
The crucial point to grow the platform is to decide precisely what will be the video that will cause people not to leave the application. That’s a near-impossible mission when it comes to choosing from millions of videos, but one that Meta’s AI is quickly getting pretty good at. The challenge is enormous if one considers that TikTok continues to be the most downloaded app on the entire planet.
Meta’s return
Meta, which recently underwent a restructuring and had to lay off 11,000 workers, will present its fourth-quarter 2022 results next week. This is an important moment for the company, especially considering that it was exactly one year ago when it began its decline and announced that, for the first time in its history, Facebook had lost users.
The announcement was followed by contractions in the hiring pace and procedures to locate underperforming employees.
Although Reels is the promise of vertical video for Meta, it is not in the short term to improve the company’s revenue. The reason is simple and the resume The WSJ: simply advertising in Reels is still cheaper than advertising on other types of content.
If the numbers are accurate and show that Meta is leading the vertical video battle, it is very likely that it will make them official during the results presentation next week. If Meta has corrected the path and managed to have no losses, neither in users nor in income, it will be halfway to come back strong, rebound on the stock market and, now, fully commit to wresting the crown from TikTok and even have the time to focus on the version of the metaverse that Zuckerberg envisions.
