Time spent on Instagram up 24% thanks to AI-driven Reels: Zuckerberg

Since Meta launched TikTok-rival short-video app Reels, AI recommendations have driven a more than 24 per cent increase in time spent on Instagram, the company CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said.

Reels continues to grow quickly on both Facebook and Instagram.

"Reels also continue to become more social with people resharing Reels more than 2 billion times every day, doubling over the last six months.

Reels are also increasing overall app engagement and we believe that we`re gaining share in short-form video too," Zuckerberg said during the company`s quarterly earnings call.

The AI is also improving monetisation and Reels monetisation efficiency is up over 30 per cent on Instagram and over 40 per cent on Facebook quarter-over-quarter, he announced.

On AI, Marta CEO said that along with surfacing content from friends and family, now more than 20 per cent of content in Facebook and Instagram feeds are recommended by AI from people, groups, or accounts that you don`t follow.

"Across all of Instagram, that`s about 40 per cent of the content that you see," said Zuckerberg.

"We`ve seen Reels time become more incremental to overall engagement on our services as we continue to improve our recommendation system," he added.

Earlier this month, Instagram added a dedicated destination for trending audio and hashtags, two new metrics to Reels insights and brought gifts on Reels to more countries.

Creators will now be able to see what the top trending topics and hashtags are on Reels.

The two new metrics being added on Reels are total watch time and average watch time.

"Total watch time captures the total amount of time your reel was played, including any time spent replaying the reel. Average watch time captures the average amount of time spent playing your reel, calculated by dividing watch time with the number of total plays," explained the company.

For example if your average watch time is 17 seconds, out of everyone who watched your Reel they watched an average of 17 seconds.