Reels is a clone. That's fine
Instagram launched Reels the day before the TikTok executive order. The format is a commodity now, and the question is whose recommender learns fastest.
Instagram launched Reels last Wednesday in about fifty countries: 15-second vertical videos with music, effects and editing tools, shown in a full-screen feed you swipe through. The next day the US government issued an executive order that would ban transactions with ByteDance in 45 days unless TikTok’s US business is sold. Microsoft is in talks to buy it.
The reaction to Reels has mostly been that it’s an obvious TikTok copy. It is. That’s fine. Copying formats is how the industry works. Instagram copied Snapchat Stories in 2016 and it worked extremely well for them. Formats aren’t defensible. Vertical short video with music, remixable sounds and a swipe feed is now a standard format, like the photo feed was before it.
What isn’t a commodity is the recommender behind the feed, and that’s where I’d look to see whether Reels works.
TikTok’s feed learns fast for reasons I wrote about when it absorbed Musical.ly: every video is short, full screen and played one at a time, so every swipe is a clean signal. It’s been training on that signal for billions of hours. Instagram has a huge amount of data about what people like, but most of it comes from a different kind of behavior, like scrolling a grid of photos, following friends and double-tapping. Those signals don’t transfer perfectly to “will this person watch this video to the end.” Reels will have to learn short video preferences mostly from scratch, from its own users’ swipes, which means it will be worse for a while.
It also has a supply question. TikTok’s content comes from creators who’ve learned to make things for TikTok’s audience and its algorithm. Right now a lot of what’s on Reels is TikToks with the watermark still on. That will change if Reels gives creators reach and money, which Instagram has the resources to do.
As for the ban, I think it’s mostly politics, and I’m not sure it survives, but it will scare some creators into hedging across platforms, which helps Reels and anyone else launching short video this year. YouTube is reportedly building its own version, and India, where TikTok was banned in June, would be the obvious place to start.
My guess is that short video ends up a standard part of every big platform within two years, and the winners will be decided by whose recommender learns each user fastest and who pays creators best. TikTok still has a large lead on the first. The second is still open.