Facebook launches ads on Instagram Reels

Instagram’s short video feature, Reels, will now carry advertisements, according to its parent and social networking giant Facebook. The ads will be first tested in India, Brazil, Germany and Australia.  

The Menlo Park, California headquartered company, in a blog post, also announced testing out sticker ads on Facebook stories with select advertisers and creators.  

Facebook claimed that over 2 billion people watch In-Stream eligible videos every month, and globally 70% the video ads are seen to completion.

The short video feature Reels was launched in July last year in India, after ByteDance backed TikTok was banned in June.  

“Starting today, we are launching a global test of In-Stream Video Topics that lets advertisers place ads in certain video topics through Ads Manager — allowing advertisers to align their brand messaging within content that is contextually relevant to their target consumer,” said the blog post.

Nearly 20 topics will be available to advertisers for In-Stream ad placements including the option for users to skip, share and like the ads. The time duration will be restricted to 30 seconds, similar to organic content on Reels.

Apart from this, Facebook will also test custom Sticker Ads on Facebook Stories for monetisation of content by the creators. The social commerce model will include bespoke brand stickers which can be placed on the Facebook Stories.  

The company claimed that In-Stream ad payouts to content creators have grown 55% from 2019 to 2020. The In-Stream ad feature is already running on Facebook Live as well as in formats which include pre, mid, post-roll and image ads.

In March, Facebook had announced new monetisation policies for short video content across its platforms.