Instagram Reels is two years old now. The short video platform, that was launched globally in July 2020, is not hurrying into serving in-stream ads on Reels and is instead taking cautious steps ahead.
India, with about 230 million users, is the largest market for Instagram globally. The company states that Reels is currently the biggest engagement growth driver for Instagram.
According to the company, Indian users make nearly six million Reels daily (July 2021). “Ads on Instagram Reels have not gone to all audiences at this stage,” informs Arun Srinivasan, director – global business group (India), Meta. In-stream ads have not yet been opened to 100% of Reels audiences.
It is worth noting that five-year-old short video platform TikTok, of which Reels is a clone, raked in $4 billion in advertising revenue in 2021.
“We are still trying to learn and scale up. As a responsible platform, we want to deliver value to advertisers,” Srinivasan mentions. The platform is working with some advertisers in certain audience cohorts at the moment.
Brands, both traditional CPG and digital-first in nature, have been working with Meta platforms to reach consumers via Reels. Srinivasan says brands like Spotify India, L'Oréal Paris and Maybelline have run ads on Reels in the last few months. Spotify collaborated with creators of Reels to promote its Holy playlist, while L'Oréal Paris and Maybelline advertised make-up and personal care products via Reels ads.
“The Spotify playlist became the most downloaded playlist and L'Oréal and Maybelline observed unaided ad recall lift and top of mind awareness lift,” reveals Srinivasan. In particular, the brand study revealed that the ads influenced younger audiences (below 25 years), who tend to spend more time on Instagram Reels.
For now, almost all branded posts on Reels are through collaborations with influencers and content creators.
Nearly 24,000 users of Instagram were impacted by 5 pm ET, according to outage-tracking website down detector, which collates status reports from a number of sources in the United States.“We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal and apologize for any inconvenience,” a Meta spokesperson said in an emailed statement. Currently, about 2,000 users are affected by the outage, according to down detector. Earlier on Thursday, Twitter Inc had a near three-hour outage that affected as many as 50,000 users at its peak, according to Down detector.com Last year, Meta had a nearly six-hour-long outage which kept WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users.
Two major social media platforms, Instagram and Twitter, on Thursday kept thousands of users across the world from accessing their accounts after the services were temporarily shut due to separate outages. Downdetector.com
According to outage tracking website, Downdetector.com, the near three-hour Twitter outage affected as many as 50,000 users at its peak around 5.45 PM IST. The microblogging website took cognizance of the situation after several users reported issues with their account.
"Some of you are having issues accessing Twitter, and we’re working to get it back up and running for everyone. Thanks for sticking with us," Twitter said. Hours later, the micro-blogging platform took to Twitter to offer an apology to users for the interruption. Twitter informed us that their service was back on. "And we’re back! We had some trouble with our internal systems that impacted many of you globally. Twitter should be up and running as expected — sorry for the interruption," the tech giant tweeted.
But after Twitter was back in service, the photo-sharing platform Instagram reported an outage as well on a global scale. At around 2 am on Friday, as many as 24,000 users were impacted, according to Down detector, which collates status reports from a number of sources in the United States.
"We're aware that some people are having trouble accessing Instagram. We're working to get things back to normal and apologize for any inconvenience," a Meta spokesperson informed Reuters in an emailed statement.
Late last year, Meta had a nearly six-hour-long outage which kept WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger out of reach for billions of users. Making light of the situation, several Instagram and Twitter users took to the microblogging site to share memes, while some wanted to check if others were facing the same issue.
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