It looks like Meta is really making a big push for Reels. Social media consultant Matt Navarra has posted a screenshot on Twitter showing a warning for an experimental Instagram feature that says all video posts will be shared as Reels in the app. If your account is public, that means anyone can discover your video and use your original audio to create their own Reel. Only friends would see your video if your profile is private, but other users can still create a remix with your Reel and download it as part of the remix. The only way to make sure no one uses your Reel for remixes is to turn off the option in Settings or turn it off for every video you post.
As TechCrunch points out, this move comes as no surprise when TikTok-style videos have quickly become a popular format on both Instagram and Facebook. When he revealed the company’s fourth quarterly earnings report for 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said Reels is now Meta’s fastest-growing content format. Meta product manager Chris Cox also said Reels was a “bright spot” for the company, in a recent note shared with employees warning them of “serious times” ahead due to the slowdown of growth. He also said that one of the projects Meta intends to focus on during the second half of 2022 is to monetize Reels as soon as possible.
Apparently, the time spent viewing short format videos has more than doubled since last year, with 80 percent of that growth coming from Facebook. That’s why the company will go so far as to redesign the Instagram and Facebook homepages to better incorporate short videos. Turning all video posts into Reels would give the company more content to circulate, which would translate into more time to watch videos on the platform and higher potential ad revenue when the format was finally monetized. That said, not all of Instagram’s experimental features reach a wide release, and it remains to be seen whether this will survive the testing phase.
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