If nothing else, the battle between TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Meta’s Reels for short-video supremacy is going to spur all three companies to regularly announce figures showing their growth.
Last week YouTube said that it now has two billion logged-in monthly users watching Shorts, up from 1.5 billion in March. But Meta also had some new stats last week as part of its latest financial results.
“Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts during Meta’s Q2 earnings call. That’s up from 140bn a day last autumn.
“We’re seeing good progress on Reels monetisation as well, with the annual revenue run-rate across our apps now exceeding $10bn, up from $3bn last fall.”
More than three quarters of Meta’s advertisers are now using Reels ads, the company added. In both YouTube and Meta’s cases, the growth stats aren’t simply a measure of short video’s popularity though.
They’re as much a reflection of how heavily both companies are pushing the format within their apps and services: it’s very hard to avoid Shorts or Reels if you’re using either. Still, new stats are handy: now might be a very fun time for TikTok to publish some new metrics in response.
And let’s not forget either that whenever these companies talk about strong short-video growth, it puts more fire in the bellies of rightsholders for the next time licensing deals covering use of music in those videos are up for renegotiation…
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