Meta Exceeds $1 Billion Annual Revenue Run Rate For Reel Ads

Latest: Meta has crossed a $1 billion annual revenue run rate for ads on its TikTok rival short-video making platform Reels, and Reels now has a higher revenue run rate than Facebook/Instagram Stories at identical times post-launch, its Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed.

Meta had announced that reels made up more than 20% of the time on its platform.

Zuckerberg said that in the April-June period, “we saw a more than 30 per cent increase in the time that people spent engaging with Reels across Facebook and Instagram”.

“Our work on ad’s monetization efficiency for Reels is actually making faster progress than we’d expected. The bottom line is, I think we’re on track here, and we just need to push through this one,” he told analysts during the company’s quarterly earnings call late on Wednesday.

Meta has seen a 15% increase in the watch time of reels video player on Facebook.   

“Reels doesn’t yet monetize at the same rate as Feed or Stories. So in the near term, the faster that Reels grows, the more revenue that actually displaces from higher monetizing surfaces,” the Meta CEO added.

“Our focus right now with Reels is ramping up ad load, improving performance and making sure the ads are easy for advertisers to create,” says COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Apart from that, Meta is also making use of AI to comprehend the Reel content so that users can engage with more relevant content and marketers can also display more relevant ads. 

Mark Zuckerberg said that they expect the amount of content recommended by its artificial intelligence systems on Facebook and Instagram to more than double by the end of next year.

If AI recommendations irritate you while you scroll through Instagram or Facebook, then you are really not going to like the future plans that Meta has.