Meghan Bobrowsky

It took them a while.

It took them five years to reach this point.

I spoke with an Instagram executive and she told me that they had to reconfigure the algorithm from scratch to make this work.

Instagram used to be a place where you would go to see content from your friends and your family and people you follow pretty much exclusively.

And this Instagram executive told me that they had to figure out a way to essentially make Instagram more like TikTok.

So it shows you

content from people who you don't follow.

And that required basically a whole reconfiguring of the algorithm.

They had to figure out a way to get signals from the content people were watching, but not from the people that you're following, which is what TikTok did really well.

TikTok, the content they show you is based on how much time you spend watching a video.

Instagram had to figure out a way to do something similar to that.

Another thing they did was prioritize original content on the platform.

From our previous reporting, we also know that they paid creators to post on Reels.

Yeah, to me, this showed that Reels is a real competitor in the space and deserves to be taken seriously.

It's no longer just this TikTok wannabe and Meta has made this into a serious product.

It's also interesting because Meta made the argument during their antitrust trial that they're not a monopoly because they face competition from YouTube and TikTok.

And while Reels is by no means a monopoly, its growth shows that it's become a real competitor in this space.

That's kind of the line that meta executives talk now.

It's interesting because the executive that I spoke with pitched Reels as the social viewing experience.

So it's something that you do with your friends.