Meta provided some fresh engagement information around its platforms on its Q1 2023 quarterly earnings call on Wednesday, with Meta CFO Susan Li joining CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg to field questions from analysts about its results. For those wondering, Zuckerberg shared today that time spent on Instagram has grown more than 24% since the company launched Reels on the platform thanks to AI-powered content recommendations—aka, the kind of non-connection recommended videos that TikTok basically built its entire brand upon.

We're very happy with what we've seen Reels drive in terms of incremental engagement on the platform so far, Li said later in response to an analyst question, adding that it's clear that people value short-term video on the platform. She further clarified that Instagram is also seeing a lot more sharing around Reels in recent months.

"We're seeing the sharing flywheel take off with Reels re-shares, with re-shares doubling over the last six months," she said.

Li appeared to punt on an analyst question asking whether Reels was translating similarly to Facebook proper but did say that on Facebook, AI-driven recommendations by users who are not close friends are growing their shares.

Although Reels and AI-driven recommendations are boosting engagement on Instagram, that's not translating directly into more revenue. In fact, Li said that Reels are actually cannibalizing some of the revenue from Stories and feed-based posts, since they are taking up some of the time users would have otherwise spent engaging with that content. The bigger picture is incremental, though, in that overall user time is rising, which Li noted will eventually be a revenue-positive point. She noted that Reels is running on track to be revenue-neutral by the end of the year, or the early part of 2024, and looked for positive contributions sometime after that. She did mention that there will be product work in figuring out proper monetization for Reels, since they're "structurally different" from the existing Instagram content types.

"We don't have line of sight to getting Reels to monetization parity with feed or Stories per time because of those structural differences," but because it's driving incremental growth, she said they're confident they will eventually become a key contributor to monetization.