Meta‘s earnings from the fourth quarter of 2024 served as a reminder that Mark Zuckerberg’s company is most likely to benefit in the event of a long-term disruption to TikTok’s operations. The tech giant’s stock price briefly reached a price of more than $700 per share after Zuck and co. announced that Meta had exceeded projections over the final quarter of the calendar year.
On a call with analysts on January 29, Zuckerberg forecasted a “big year” for Meta’s properties. Citing innovations like Meta AI, the founder of the company originally known as Facebook predicted that new products would generate a “long-term advantage” powered by industry-leading scale.
A lot of those products will be catered to creators and users who upload and consume Instagram Reels. With TikTok facing the threat of a U.S. ban, Meta has positioned Instagram as the natural successor to the embattled, ByteDance-owned app. To make that case, Meta has fortified Reels with a slew of new features that will bring the format’s user experience closer to what TikTok’s.
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Those updates have been supported by two powerful assets: Algorithmic promotion and cold, hard cash. The money has come in the form of direct payments to TikTokers, while the ranking boost has arrived for Instagram creators who have hacked the app’s new Trial Reels feature.
The data-driven creators who have experimented with Trial Reels may also be interested in new tracking tools that analyze videos through metrics like View Rate and Views Over Time. Instagram Head Adam Mosseri has identified viewership data among the most important numbers creators should look at when evaluating their content.
Meta’s Q4 2024 updates show that Instagram’s feature-rich approach is paying off. With $48.4 billion in quarterly revenue, Meta raised its topline number by 21% year-over-year. “We’re going to learn what’s going to happen with TikTok, and regardless of that, I expect Reels on Instagram and Facebook to continue growing,” Zuckerberg said.
The stock market bump that followed the Q4 2024 report got Meta off to the “big year” Zuckerberg wants. Whether because of Instagram’s new products or because of Zuckerberg’s deference to President Trump, investors are high on Meta. Can the parent company of Facebook and Instagram reel in the revenue it has promised?
