U.S. Eastern Time, in the midst of negotiations between Microsoft and ByteDance regarding the acquisition of TikTok’s multinational business, Facebook took advantage of the trend to launch Reels, an Instagram feature very similar to Tiktok, vowing to replace Tiktok’s take away in the United States. Large user groups.
Reels is very similar to the American version of TikTok, both of which allow users to use audio and AI technology to superimpose their own videos to make 15-second short films . After launching in Brazil in November 2019, Instagram expanded it to France, Germany, and India in June and July respectively. The company announced yesterday that the US market and other countries will also open this feature.
As a result, Instagram’s parent company, Facebook, really looks a bit ugly. When foreign software was embarrassed on all sides, it tried its best to occupy the US short video market that was about to be blank . As the technology media The Verge commented: Facebook used Instagram to steal the history of other applications. When Instagram launched a story feature that replicated Snap chat in 2016, it seemed to effortlessly grab the momentum of its competitors, surpassing the usage of the app in less than a year. Other media also use words such as “plagiarism”, “clone”, and “copy”. It seems that Facebook has indicated that it will copy it this time.
(Instagram’s new Reels interface)
Reels occupied Instagram’s search rankings on the first day it was launched, and it also gathered stars to “call” for this new feature, such as Selena Gomez and Will Smith (Will). Smith) and other superstars have also tried it out. Serena Gomez’s Reels short video quickly gained 40 million views.
But so far, users are still not used to the reaction to this new feature. Some users believe that there is no way to get TikTok views for the videos posted on it. A user posted the same video on TikTok and Reels at the same time, and got 400,000 to 20 views. He left an angry message: My video was posted on TikTok, and the same video was also posted on “Instagram Reels”. The United States once again disappointed me.
Technology journalist Kurt Wagner believes: “Instagram used to be known for its simplicity, but as Facebook continues to introduce new features to fight off competitors, it has become too messy and complicated.”
Facebook’s current priority is to occupy a dominant market position, and Instagram’s job is to help Facebook achieve this goal. Whether it’s the Story feature launched before or the less popular IGTV now, Facebook has repeatedly failed to copy popular social platforms. Recently, the company shut down an application called Lasso, this is the company’s first attempt to replicate TikTok as a standalone application. Not only that, the company also shut down Hobbi, an app designed to compete with Pinterest. Perhaps because of this reason, Facebook finally realized that no one cares about independent software that is not attached to Instagram and Facebook, and it cannot get the attention of a large number of user groups.
At the same time, regulators are investigating whether Facebook and other large technology companies use their size and dominance to compete unfairly and put their opponents at a disadvantage. Last week, at a congressional hearing to review the power of large technology companies, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Mark Zuckerberg) was asked about this strategy and replied that Facebook, like other companies, “adjusted the introduction of others Function.”
In this regard, TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer (Kevin Mayer), also a former Disney executive, was very disdainful of this behavior. He accused Facebook of trying to discredit TikTok and make it lose business in the United States . Just before the hearing, Meyer wrote bitterly in a blog titled “Fair Competition and Transparency Beneficial for All”: “For those who want to launch competitive products, we have to say, although Come on! Facebook even launched another copycat product, Reels, before their other copycat product Lasso was quickly defeated. However, we want to focus our energy on consumers and fair and open competition, not by us Facebook’s competitor maliciously attacked. It disguised as patriotism and wanted to end our presence in the United States.”
Facebook launched this short video function when Microsoft negotiated with ByteDance, which made users feel the sense of crisis facing the company. In March 2020, TikTok became the world’s most downloaded non-game application with more than 115.2 million installs. In contrast, the average number of Instagram downloads per quarter in 2019 was only 111.5 million. Top brands such as Chipotle, Mucinex, Walmart and GymShark are all marketing to new generations of users through sponsored hashtag challenge events on TikTok. However, TikTok only entered the global market in August 2018. Compared with the market’s big brother Instagram, it was 8 years slower, and there is a tendency for latecomers to dominate.
Currently, Instagram still has more users than TikTok, with more than 1.8 billion downloads worldwide. In November 2019, the mobile data company Sensor Tower announced that TikTok had reached the milestone of 1.5 billion downloads. Although Instagram leads TikTok in overall downloads, TikTok’s new user growth rate is significantly higher than it. This contrast in new user growth is largely because TikTok is still a novice in this market, and Instagram, as a mature social media application, is heading towards a flat period. If Zuckerberg does not “interfere” at this time, it is likely that the market will become another world in a few years.
(Instagram and TikTok download comparison, source: mediakix)
Earlier this year, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri told the media when talking about Snapchat: “When someone does a great thing, we must be willing to admit it and work hard to learn from it.” Then Now it seems to be learning or copycat? It’s all due to the high-level propaganda.
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