1/ As an $FB shareholder and avid user of TikTok I've been closely following Reels since its US launch in August 2020. The product and the videos have been slowly improving over time but it's still nowhere as good as TikTok. So I decided two look at two hypothesis as to why:
2/ First, is Reels not able to attract the creators that I find entertaining?
Second, do they have the creators but the algorithm doesn't know how to surface the content to me?
For context, most of my TikTok usage is comedy but most of my Reels is animals and cute kids 😬
3/ This isn't suppose to be a highly scientific but I started skimming through videos I previously liked on TikTok and looked up the creator on IG. Here are insights from 26 of the larger creators representing 2.4B likes on TikTok.
4/ 50% of creators don't post on IG at all or rarely do. But more importantly, this 50% represented 74% of TikTok likes. This is driven by the fact that two large creators (yoleendadong and zlnccx1) with 941M likes, use IG as more of a fan page, not sharing content
5/ My general sense is that it's the combination of both hypothesis (only some creators are on IG and the algo isn't super sophisticated) that leads to a subpar experience on Reels. Maybe IG can fix this over time with scale, tech, and growing a new set of creators native to IG?
