Indians upload 6 mn short-form videos on Instagram every day

Moj is the leading platform among Indian alternatives that cropped up after the TikTok ban. Moj has 47.78 million monthly active users (MAUs), followed by MX TakaTak, which is owned by Times Internet and has 23.95 million MAUs, and Dailyhunt’s Josh, which has 14 million, according to data from digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb.

Mohan did not share the total user base of Reels. However, as the platform is part of the Instagram app, its user base virtually extends to Instagram’s entire user base. The platform has 210 million users in India, while its parent platform has almost double that, according to data shared by the government in February.

Further, Instagram is in the early stages of also monetizing Reels, Mohan said. “A lot of our focus from a product point of view is how we constantly raise the bar in terms of creating new tools for creators, how we make it easier for them to reach global audiences and how we make it easier for these creators to build sustainable revenue streams,” he said.

“By introducing ads on Reels, by doing work around expanding monetization tools, the objective is that creators can translate their followership into revenue streams, whether it is by monetization tools that we are thinking about over the next few months, or working with bra-nds in partnership,” he said.

The company is in the “very early stages” of testing ads on Reels and has experimented to deliver contextual ads, he said.