As U.S. President Donald Trump showed an attempt to prevent TikTok from being kicked out of the U.S. with a TikTok-friendly move, Instagram, which was aiming for “foolishness,” seems to be taking a more aggressive strategy.
“Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri recently told employees that he is considering launching Reels as a standalone app,” the tech media Deformation reported on Wednesday. Reels is a short-form video service similar to TikTok. Currently, the service is only available on Instagram, a photo-oriented social media, and the company plans to separate it and launch it as a separate app to compete with TikTok.
Reels is considered a TikTok-like short-form service along with YouTube Shorts. Instagram has been considered a company that will benefit the most from the removal of TikTok. However, as the second Trump administration has shown its willingness to maintain TikTok’s service in the U.S., the much-anticipated benefits are likely to disappear. Instagram also plans to take a more aggressive action against the move.
In fact, Reels appeared in 2020 at a time when Trump was trying to ban the use of TikTok in the United States and was criticized for targeting the “community without any issues” with similar services. As it is a competitive app, it has benefited from TikTok’s embarrassing situation since then.
“By the time the TikTok ban took effect in January this year, Instagram began offering tens of thousands of dollars per month on the condition that creators operate exclusively in Reels,” DeInformation said. “CEO Moseri mentioned that Instagram users exploded after being banned from using TikTok in India due to a border dispute with China in 2020.” Currently, one in four Instagram users are in India, and a third of their total usage time occurs in India. Instagram is said to be considering providing a longer three-minute video service when separating Reels as an independent app. The project is codenamed Ray, DeInformation said. “The Instagram parent company Meta is paying attention to the fact that increasing video services can increase the amount of time users spend on apps and consequently help advertisers.” Meta Chief Financial Officer Susan Lee met with Annalys last month and said, “There has been an increase in the amount of time we watch videos on Instagram around the world.”
Meta does not disclose advertising sales from certain services, including Instagram, but according to market research firm Imaketer, advertising sales in the U.S. on Instagram rose 24% last year, accounting for about half of Meta’s total U.S. advertising sales.
Meta has previous experience of separating popular services in apps or successfully expanding its user base with new services based on existing platforms. For example, after releasing Facebook Messenger as a separate app in August 2014, the number of users increased from 200 million to 500 million in three months. The X-like service Thread, based on the Instagram network, will have more than 300 million monthly active users since its launch in July 2023.
JENNIFER KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
