Every figure on this page links to the organization that produced it, and each was re-checked against that source before publishing. How much of Instagram's time and Meta's revenue Reels account for, by Meta's own filings and earnings calls; how long a Reel can be and how Instagram ranks it; who uses Instagram, by Pew, Ofcom and Reuters Institute surveys; how Reels perform for brands in five vendors' datasets, and why their engagement rates differ sixfold; how Reels compare with YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Snapchat Spotlight; and where the popular Reels numbers came from.
Reels were 50% of time spent in Instagram in April 2024, up from more than 20% two years earlier, Meta said. (Meta)See details
Meta put Reels' annual revenue run rate at over $50 billion in October 2025, about 17 times the $3 billion it gave in October 2022. (Meta; our calculation)See details
Published Reels engagement rates differ about 6-fold between two vendors that divide by different things: 0.52% per follower (Socialinsider) against 3.3% per account reached (Buffer). (Our calculation)See details
82% of recent Shorts from the biggest YouTube channels ran 60 seconds or less (median 40 seconds), though a Reel may now run 20 minutes. (Our measurement; Instagram)See details
Instagram does not recommend Reels longer than 3 minutes to new audiences. (Instagram Help Center)See details
More than 50% of what people saw on Instagram in 2024 was recommended from accounts they don't follow; 75% of U.S. recommendations were original posts by Q4 2025. (Meta)See details
51% of U.S. adults use Instagram (Pew, 2026): 79% of those aged 18 to 29 and 21% of those 65 and older. (Pew Research Center)See details
The '22% more engagement' line began as one week of 20 NBA team accounts in August 2020; Conviva's fuller analysis found 67% for NFL teams. (Origin trace)See details
How long are Reels allowed to be, and how long are short videos in practice?
A Reel can now run up to 20 minutes, Instagram's Help Center said in October 2026 (Instagram Help Center), but Instagram will not recommend a Reel longer than 3 minutes to new audiences. That is 80 times the 15-second clips Instagram launched on August 5, 2020. The cap reached 90-second Reels by June 2022, and on January 21, 2025 Instagram made Reels up to 3 minutes eligible for recommendation to non-followers (Instagram).
Most short videos are far shorter than the cap. We measured this on YouTube Shorts, the closest rival format with public durations. In our YouTube Shorts length study of 574 recent Shorts from 94 of the most-subscribed channels, the median Short ran 40 seconds. 82% ran 60 seconds or less, and 11% ran 15 seconds or less, the length of a Reel at launch. Only 5.9% ran longer than 90 seconds, the cap for recommending Reels to non-followers before 2025, and 100% would fit inside Instagram's current 3-minute limit for recommendation. Instagram does not publish Reel durations, so we cannot run the same count on Reels.
The vendor data points the same way. In Socialinsider's study of about 9.77 million Reels posted from January to June 2026, Reels of 45 to 60 seconds had the highest engagement rate of any length band, 0.35%, and the highest median views, 10,374. Reels of 1 to 30 seconds had median views of 4,700 (Socialinsider). Socialinsider sells social media analytics software.
Source for the Shorts figures: Mark Studios' calculation from the public shorts.csv (CC BY 4.0).
How often do big websites link to Instagram?
Almost half of them do. In our website social media links study, 46% of the 572 most-visited homepages we could read linked to an Instagram profile. Among the 382 homepages that linked to any social network, 69% linked to Instagram. Homepages linked to Instagram about 3.1 times as often as to TikTok, and 82 of the 85 homepages with a TikTok link also had an Instagram link. Threads, Instagram's text app, appeared on 24 homepages.
Source: Mark Studios' calculation from the public sites.csv (CC BY 4.0). The sample is the world's most-visited sites, not small businesses.
How much of Instagram time goes to Reels?
About half. Mark Zuckerberg told investors in April 2024 that Reels alone made up 50% of the time people spent in Instagram, up from more than 20% in April 2022 (Meta Q1 2024 earnings call). Instagram itself said in June 2022 that people spent 20% of their Instagram time on Reels (Instagram). By early 2024 video of all kinds was more than 60% of time spent on Facebook and on Instagram (Meta). These are management statements on earnings calls, not audited figures.
The federal court that decided FTC v. Meta in November 2025 saw Meta's internal data. Between February 2023 and January 2025, the share of Instagram time Americans spent watching Reels more than tripled, while by January 2025 only 7% of Instagram time went to content from friends (against 17% on Facebook) (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia). In Meta's own holdout test, Instagram users who had Reels spent almost 50% more time on Instagram than a control group without it.
Growth has continued. Meta said Instagram video time grew more than 20% year over year in Q2 2025 and more than 30% in Q3 2025 (Meta), and U.S. Reels watch time was up more than 30% in Q4 2025 (Meta). Ranking changes in Q1 2026 lifted Reels time on Instagram by 10% (Meta).
How much of what people see on Instagram is recommended?
More than half. In April 2024 Meta said that, for the first time, more than 50% of the content people see on Instagram was recommended by its AI from accounts they don't follow, up from about 40% a year earlier (Meta Q1 2024 earnings call). Meta credits those recommendations with a more than 24% increase in time spent on Instagram from the launch of Reels to early 2023 (Meta).
Instagram has also shifted recommendations toward original posts. In July 2024 Meta said more than half of U.S. Instagram recommendations came from original posts; that was more than 60% in October 2024 and 75% in Q4 2025 (Meta). Since April 2024 Instagram has dropped accounts from recommendations if they repost others' content 10 or more times in 30 days without adding to it (Instagram). Fresh posts matter too: same-day posts were more than 30% of recommended Reels on Instagram and Facebook in Q1 2026, more than double a year earlier (Meta).
How Instagram ranks a Reel, in its own words: its May 2023 explainer says the most important predictions are how likely you are to reshare a reel, watch it to the end, like it and visit the audio page (Instagram). It shows less of Reels that are low resolution, watermarked, muted, bordered or mostly text. Its 2025 creator guidance lists watch time, retention, shares, likes and comments as signals and tells creators to hook viewers in the first 3 seconds (Instagram). Meta's Transparency Center says a lightweight model first picks about 100 candidate Reels before final ranking, and that one prediction is whether you will watch more of a Reel than 95% of people who watched Reels of the same length (Meta Transparency Center).
How many Reels are watched and shared each day?
The latest play count Meta gave was more than 200 billion Reels plays a day across Facebook and Instagram, in July 2023, up from more than 140 billion in October 2022 (Meta Q2 2023 earnings call). Meta has not repeated a plays figure since. It has reported reshares instead: people reshared Reels 1 billion times a day through Instagram DMs alone in Q3 2022, more than 2 billion times a day in Q1 2023, 3.5 billion in Q4 2023 and more than 4.5 billion by Q4 2024 (Meta). Instagram's own February 2025 creator post puts the 4.5 billion daily reshares "across Instagram and Facebook" (Instagram).
How many people use Instagram?
Instagram reached 3 billion monthly active users in September 2025, Mark Zuckerberg said (Meta Q3 2025 earnings call), as Meta's newsroom also announced (Meta). It had passed one billion in June 2018 (Instagram). Daily, Instagram was "just shy" of 2 billion at the end of 2025 and reached 2 billion daily actives by July 2026 (Meta). Across all of Meta's apps, 3.64 billion people used at least one app each day on average in September 2026 (Meta Q3 2026 earnings release).
Regional counts come from filings and regulators. In the U.S., about 225 million people use Instagram each month, according to trial testimony cited in the FTC v. Meta opinion (U.S. District Court). In the EU, Meta's Digital Services Act reports give about 281.8 million average monthly users for January to June 2025, with 47.2M in Germany; that was about 250 million in the second half of 2022 and 257 million in the first half of 2023 (Meta Platforms Ireland), growth of about 13%. The European Commission's list of very large platforms shows Instagram at 259 million (European Commission), an older reading it does not date.
How much money do Reels make for Meta?
Reels had an annual revenue run rate of over $50 billion by October 2025, Mark Zuckerberg said (Meta Q3 2025 earnings call). That is about 17 times the $3 billion combined Instagram and Facebook run rate Meta gave in October 2022. Reels ads had first crossed a $1 billion run rate in July 2022 and passed $10 billion in July 2023 (Meta). A run rate is a company's own annualized figure, not reported segment revenue; Meta does not break out Reels revenue in its financial statements.
Reels cost Meta money before they made it. In October 2022 Meta described a more than $500 million quarterly revenue headwind from the shift to Reels, because Reels earned less per view than Feed and Stories (Meta). Reels monetization efficiency rose more than 30% on Instagram quarter over quarter in Q1 2023, and by February 2024 Meta said Reels was now contributing to its net revenue across its apps (Meta). Meta's latest 10-K still says Reels monetizes at a lower rate than Feed and Stories and expects that to continue (Meta Form 10-K, fiscal 2025). The FTC v. Meta opinion records that Meta spent around $4 billion on Reels in 2024 (U.S. District Court).
Advertisers moved quickly. Over 40% of Meta's advertisers used Reels ads by the end of 2022, and more than 3/4 (three-quarters) did by mid-2023 (Meta). Across Meta's apps, ad impressions grew 23% year over year in Q4 2022, while the average price per ad fell; Meta's fiscal 2022 10-K tied part of the decrease in average price per ad to more ads in lower-priced formats such as video and Reels (Meta Form 10-K, fiscal 2022). By Q3 2026 impressions grew 10% and price per ad 14%, on revenue of $64.60 billion for the quarter (Meta Q3 2026 earnings release).
Meta does not publish what Instagram pays creators in total. The figure it does publish is for Facebook: nearly $3 billion paid to creators in 2025 (Meta). In July 2021 Meta pledged over $1 billion through 2022 for creator programs on Facebook and Instagram, including Reels bonuses (Meta); its Reels Play bonus paid up to $35,000 a month at its peak (Meta). Today Instagram pays $.01 (one cent) for each Star a viewer sends as a gift on a Reel, to creators in countries where Gifts is available with at least 500 followers who are 18 or older, as of October 2026 (Instagram Help Center). Instagram had more than 1M active creator subscriptions by November 2023 (Instagram).
What are Instagram's current Reels specs and tools?
As read on October 31, 2026, Instagram's Help Center accepts Reels at any aspect ratio between 1.91:1 and 9:16, at a minimum of 30 frames per second and 720 pixels (Instagram Help Center). It recommends cover images of 420px by 654px, and keeps the original resolution of photos between 1.91:1 and 3:4, the ratio of the profile grid. Posts can now carry up to 5 hashtags (Instagram Help Center), although Meta's developer documentation (as captured in May 2026) still lists captions of up to 2200 characters with 30 hashtags (Meta for Developers). Reels published through the API can run from 3 seconds to 15 mins (Meta for Developers). A Reel boosted as an ad must be 90 seconds or less and full-screen vertical (Instagram Help Center).
Instagram's creator advice, first posted in 2022, is to shoot high-resolution vertical 9:16 video without borders and to catch viewers in the first 3 seconds (Instagram). Meta's ad guidance adds that over 75% of Reels views on Instagram are sound on (Meta).
Trial Reels, launched on December 10, 2024, are shown to non-followers first, with results after about 24 hours and an option to share a trial automatically with followers if it performs well within 72 hours (Instagram). In October 2026 they needed a public professional account with at least 200 followers, or 1,000 for a personal account (Instagram Help Center). In June 2025 Instagram said 40% of creators who tried them began posting Reels more often, and 80% of those saw more reach from non-followers, in an internal analysis of over 400,000 creators (Instagram).
Edits, Instagram's standalone editing app, launched on April 22, 2025 with camera capture of up to 10 minutes (Meta). It shipped over 130 features in its first year (Instagram), and by Q4 2025 nearly 10% of Reels viewed each day were made in it, almost triple the previous quarter (Meta). Instagram recommends exporting from Edits at 2K, HDR and 60 frames per second (Instagram).
Reels also reach the living room: Instagram began testing an app for TV on Amazon Fire TV on December 16, 2025, added Google TV on February 24, 2026 and Samsung smart TVs from the 2020 model year in June 2026 (Meta).
Who uses Instagram?
Half of American adults: 51% said they ever use Instagram in Pew Research Center's 2026 survey of 5,511 adults, third behind YouTube and Facebook (Pew Research Center). That is up from 28% in 2016, a rise of 23 percentage points, though Pew changed how it surveys people over that period. Use is far higher among the young: Americans aged 18 to 29 are about 3.8 times as likely as those 65 and older to use it.
Among U.S. teens aged 13 to 17, 63% used Instagram in Pew's fall 2025 survey, against 61% in 2024, 59% in 2023 and 52% in 2014-15 (Pew Research Center). 55% use it every day and 12% "almost constantly". Teens aged 15 to 17 use it far more (three-quarters) than those aged 13 to 14 (44%). Gallup's 2023 survey put U.S. teens' average time on Instagram at 0.9 hours a day (Gallup).
Instagram is now a news source for many. 23% of U.S. adults said they regularly get news there in August 2026, up from 11% in 2020, and 43% of adults aged 18 to 29 do (Pew Research Center). Among Instagram's own U.S. users, 46% regularly get news there, up from 28% in 2020. Across 48 markets in early 2026, 26% of online respondents used Instagram for news and 53% used it for any purpose; among 18-to-24-year-olds Instagram was the biggest social platform for news, at 42% (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026).
How much time do people spend on Instagram?
In the UK, where Ofcom measures it with Ipsos, Instagram reached 78% of online adults in May 2025, or 38.5 million people (Ofcom Online Nation 2025). Users averaged 19 minutes a day, up about 58% from 12 minutes in 2023. Ofcom's overview of the same report rounds this to 20 minutes (Ofcom); we show the body text's figure. Women accounted for 61% of the time spent, and 15-to-17-year-olds averaged 36 minutes a day, against 50 on TikTok. The app reached 44% of online adults on an average day. For comparison, YouTube averaged 51 minutes a day per UK adult user and TikTok reached 56% of online adults (Ofcom). For news, 18% of UK adults used Instagram in 2024, 41% of 16-to-24-year-olds and 21% of 12-to-15-year-olds (Ofcom News Consumption in the UK 2024).
Globally there is no independent count of Instagram time. Similarweb data in DataReportal's Digital 2026 report put the typical Android user at 1 hour and 13 minutes a day in the app (DataReportal / Kepios, citing Similarweb), and GWI found 55.1% of online adults had used Instagram in the past month (DataReportal / Kepios, citing GWI). Meta's ad tools showed an Instagram ad audience of 1.74 billion in January 2025, 28.8% of adults worldwide, including 414 million in India, 172 million in the U.S. and 141 million in Brazil (DataReportal / Kepios). Kepios warns that ad audiences are not user counts and can include duplicate and non-human accounts.
Do Reels get more engagement than carousels and photos?
It depends on what you divide by. Measured per follower, brand carousels edged out Reels in 2025: 0.55% against 0.52% in Socialinsider's dataset (Socialinsider). Measured per account reached, Buffer found the same gap far wider: carousels 6.9%, Reels 3.3% (Buffer). Measured per view (the report does not label this figure, but its per-follower rates run 0.1% to 0.5%), Dash Social put brand Reels first at 2.7% in the second half of 2025 (Dash Social). The same format's published rate differs about 6-fold between vendors, which divide by different things and draw on different accounts. All three sell social media software and analyse their own customers' or tracked accounts' posts.
Reels do win on reach. Buffer's analysis of more than 4 million posts from 2022 to 2024 found Reels reached 36 percent more accounts than carousels and 125 percent more than single photos, while carousels got 12 percent more engagement (Buffer). Socialinsider's 2025 benchmark found Reels brought more impressions for accounts under 50K followers, while carousels did better for bigger pages (Socialinsider).
But Reels reach per post has fallen as brands post more of them. Metricool measured Instagram Reels reach down 20% from September 2023 to September 2024, and its 2026 study found it down 35% year over year (Metricool). Socialinsider counted brands posting 33% more Reels year over year, an average of 8 a month in 2025 (Socialinsider). Back in Q2 2022, Emplifi found nearly 50% of brands posted at least one Reel a quarter, rising to 90% in Q2 2023 as Reels engagement fell 30% year over year (Emplifi). Dash Social reports viewers watch a brand Reel for an average of four seconds before moving on (Dash Social).
What do marketers and Meta's own studies report?
In Wyzowl's survey of 266 video marketers in late 2025, 69% had used Instagram for video and 56% rated it effective, second to YouTube (Wyzowl). In HubSpot's 2026 survey of more than 1,100 social media professionals, 79.56% used Instagram, the most of any platform (HubSpot). Sprout Social's 2026 content survey found 52% of social users most likely to engage with short-form video under 60 seconds (Sprout Social). Wyzowl sells video production; HubSpot and Sprout Social sell marketing software.
Meta's own advertiser research is the platform measuring itself. A Meta meta-analysis of 63 brand lift studies (January 2023 to February 2024) found campaigns that used Reels ads had 14% higher average ad-recall lift (Meta). In a Meta-commissioned GWI survey, 61% of heavy short-form viewers said Reels ads led them to consider a brand further (Meta). Campaigns whose Reels ads followed Meta's creative basics (vertical, sound, safe zones) got 2X the delivery to the Reels placement (Meta).
How do Reels compare with YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Snapchat Spotlight?
Each platform counts differently, so the headline numbers do not line up. YouTube Shorts averaged over 200 billion daily views in mid-2025, Alphabet said, up from 70 billion at the end of 2023 and 30 billion in early 2022 (Alphabet Q2 2025 earnings call). Meta's last daily figure for Reels was over 200 billion plays across Facebook and Instagram in July 2023, and it has not updated it. TikTok's chief executive told the U.S. Senate in January 2024 that TikTok had more than a billion monthly users worldwide and well over 170 million in the U.S. (TikTok). Snapchat's Spotlight averaged more than 550 million monthly users in Q2 2025 (Snap Inc.).
Platform
Latest figure the owner published
Max length (owner's own page)
Instagram Reels
3 billion Instagram monthly users (Sep 2025); 4.5 billion daily Reels reshares across Instagram and Facebook
20 minutes; 3 minutes to be recommended
YouTube Shorts
Over 200 billion daily views (2025); 2 billion+ logged-in monthly users (end of 2023) Alphabet
three minutes from July 2021 TikTok; its current limit is not stated on a page TikTok serves as text
Snapchat Spotlight
Over 550 million monthly users (Q2 2025)
not compared
YouTube said over 10 million channels were publishing Shorts each day as of March 2026 (Alphabet). Snap said Spotlight was more than 40% of time spent watching content on Snapchat in Q2 2025, with Spotlight time up 23% year over year (Snap Inc.). Metricool, comparing its own Instagram and TikTok studies of early 2026, found Instagram Reels drew nearly 30% fewer views than TikTok videos (Metricool).
The FTC v. Meta opinion (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, November 2025) shows how closely Reels and TikTok compete. More than 70% of TikTok time is spent in its For You feed. When TikTok briefly went offline in the U.S. in January 2025, Americans used Instagram 72% or 58% more than on prior weekends, depending on the measure; after India banned TikTok in 2020, Indians' time on Instagram rose about 150% (U.S. District Court). In 2021 Meta estimated TikTok was costing it 4–5% of active Instagram users' time. The court found Meta's share of social time spent was around 30% once TikTok and YouTube are counted, and ruled for Meta.
Teen rules shape who sees Reels. Meta said at least 54 million teens were in Instagram Teen Accounts by April 2025 and that 97% of those aged 13 to 15 kept the default restrictions (Meta). Teen Accounts prompt teens to leave the app after 60 minutes a day.
What do the popular Reels numbers really say?
Five Reels numbers turn up in most Instagram marketing articles. We traced each to where it started.
"Reels get 22% more engagement than regular videos"
It began as one week of NBA team accounts. The earliest report we found is Front Office Sports on August 16, 2020: per data from the analytics firm Conviva, engagements per Reel for the 20 NBA teams that posted Reels in the format's first week were 22% higher than each team's average Instagram video (Front Office Sports); SportsPro reported the same 22 per cent two days later (SportsPro). In September 2020 Influencer Marketing Hub credited the 22% to Conviva and the NBA (Influencer Marketing Hub). By June 2022 its page had generalised it to "Reels receive 22% more engagement than regular Instagram video posts" (Influencer Marketing Hub), Buffer listed 22% as a finding with a link to that page (Buffer), and roundups in 2026 still repeat 22% with no study named (DemandSage). Conviva's own fuller analysis a month later found a 67% gap for NFL teams (Conviva). For brands, use a brand dataset instead: Emplifi found brand Reels drew almost 40% more median interactions than traditional Instagram video in Q2 2022 (Emplifi), and today's per-follower benchmarks put Reels level with or behind carousels (see above).
"Reels get twice the reach"
This comes from a real study with a narrow measure. Socialinsider's analysis of 7,159,941 posts from January 2022 to May 2023 found Reels had 2x the reach rate (reach divided by followers) of other Instagram post types, with a reach rate of 30.81% (Socialinsider), a figure later repeated by Strike Social. Buffer's larger sample, more than 4 million posts from 2022 to October 2024, found Reels reached 36% more than other posts overall (Buffer): about double single photos, but only a third more than carousels. Some roundups add Stories to the comparison, 2x (Adam Connell); the study did not measure Stories.
"2.35 billion people use Reels" and "Reels are 35% of Instagram time"
Meta has never published a count of Reels users. "More than 2 billion people interact with Reels every month" (DemandSage) matches Instagram's whole-app count of more than 2 billion monthly actives from October 2022 (Meta), now 3 billion. We found no source at all for the 2025 roundup figures of 2.35 billion (Teleprompter) or for Reels being 35% of Instagram time (Teleprompter). The time-share figures Meta did give are more than 20% (April 2022) and 50% (April 2024), shown above. A widely quoted 17.6 million hours a day of Reels watching comes from a 2022 internal Meta document reported by The Wall Street Journal (Pixel Envy, quoting the WSJ); it is a leaked 2022 snapshot, not a current figure.
"Reels are played 200 billion times a day" and "reshared 4.5 billion times"
Both are Meta's numbers, but often cut from their scope. The plays figures, 140 billion a day in October 2022 and 200 billion in July 2023, cover Facebook and Instagram together (Meta); one roundup calls the 140 billion Instagram-only (Adam Connell). Meta has given no plays figure since 2023, so figures such as 175.0 billion daily Instagram plays and 3.80 billion daily DM reshares (VoxBooster) match nothing Meta has said, though they were still published in August 2026. The 4.5 billion daily reshares came from CFO Susan Li in January 2025 (Meta), inside a passage about Instagram; Instagram's own creator post later put it across Instagram and Facebook.
"91% of Instagram users watch video every week"
This is Instagram's own figure, from a survey. Instagram's business site said 91% of active Instagram users surveyed watch videos on Instagram weekly, citing a Facebook-commissioned Ipsos survey from November 2020 of 4,500 active users aged 18 to 50 in nine countries (Instagram for Business, Internet Archive). It describes survey respondents who create content, not all users. Before that the same page said 70% of Gen Z and 50% of millennials watched weekly (Instagram for Business, July 2021). Repeaters in 2026 still drop the scope: "91% of Instagram users" (Levitate Media).
"726.8 million people use Reels"
Reels ad reach is not a user count. DataReportal reported that Meta's ad tools could show Reels ads to 675 million users in January 2022, 754.8 million in July 2022 and 758.5 million in October 2022 (DataReportal / Kepios), and it cautions that ad reach is not a proxy for users. We could not find 726.8 million in the text of any DataReportal report we checked; 2026 roundups present it as "people who use Reels" (Adam Connell) and as 726.8 million users (Cropink).
We started from the questions people search for about instagram reels statistics and looked for the organization that actually produced each answer. Every figure on this page sits in an evidence ledger with its source, the exact table or paragraph it came from, the measurement period, the population measured, and the date we checked it. This edition holds 255 figures from 31 publishers.
On October 31, 2026, each of the sourced figures on this page was re-fetched with the fetch cache cleared and matched against the recorded wording: Meta's earnings call transcripts and earnings releases (as Meta hosts them) and its 10-K filings on SEC EDGAR; Meta's newsroom, Instagram's blog, @creators posts and Help Center; Meta's Transparency Center and Digital Services Act reports; Alphabet, Snap and TikTok statements about their own platforms; the FTC v. Meta opinion; Pew Research Center, Ofcom, the Reuters Institute and Gallup; DataReportal; and the vendors' own benchmark pages. Instagram's Help Center only renders in a browser, so those rows were re-read in headless Chromium the same day (browser-check.json). Pages that refuse scripts (Ofcom, parts of instagram.com and facebook.com) were checked against Internet Archive captures. Our own figures are calculations from the public data files of two earlier Mark Studios studies. We left out Edison Research's Infinite Dial (its site blocks automated reading), HubSpot's gated State of Marketing report, Hootsuite and Later Reels figures that come with no sample, and roundup figures we could not trace to a producer.
We only cite the producer: government agencies, regulators, company filings and official posts, and the survey owner's own report. We do not cite statistics roundups, Statista-style aggregators, or salary sites without a public method. We did not bypass paywalls or sign-up forms; where a full report was gated, we used only the figures its publisher states publicly.
Figures marked "our calculation" are arithmetic on the cited numbers, and anyone can reproduce them:
This edition contains no Mark Studios customer data.
Limitations
Most Reels-specific numbers come from Meta itself. Time-share, plays, reshares and run-rate figures are management statements on earnings calls, not audited results, and Meta changes which figure it reports from quarter to quarter. It has not given a daily plays figure since July 2023 or a Reels time share since April 2024.
Brand performance data comes from vendors that sell social media software. Socialinsider, Buffer, Metricool, Dash Social and Emplifi analyse the accounts they track, with different samples and different engagement denominators, so their rates cannot be compared with each other directly.
Our length figures are measured on YouTube Shorts, not Reels. Instagram does not publish Reel durations and its site cannot be read at scale without logging in, so we used our public Shorts dataset as the nearest comparison.
Audience counts measure different things. Pew counts adults who say they ever use Instagram; Ofcom measures devices; Meta counts monthly actives; DataReportal's figures are advertising audiences, which can include duplicate and non-human accounts.
Help Center rules change without notice. Length limits, hashtag limits and eligibility thresholds are as read on October 31, 2026.
How to cite this page
For a single figure, cite the original publisher named next to it, and link here if the verification trail is useful to your readers. Each figure has its own anchor, so you can link straight to it, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/instagram-reels-statistics#DRV-015. To cite the page as a whole:
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APA
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MLA
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Chicago
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Our calculations and the evidence table are free to reuse with attribution and a link to this page. Each underlying figure remains the claim of its original publisher, and some publishers ask for a link when their figures are reused.
We re-verify every figure quarterly and when a major source publishes a new edition. The next scheduled review is January 2027. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.
Oct 31, 2026: First published with 255 figures from 31 publishers, each checked against its original source.
Oct 31, 2026: Corrected five descriptions after a source-by-source check. The sixfold spread in Reels engagement rates comes from two vendors that divide by different things and track different accounts, not from the denominator alone. Buffer's carousel lead runs the same way as Socialinsider's, only wider. Metricool's 35% drop is from a separate 2026 study. 90 seconds was the cap for recommending Reels before 2025. Socialinsider found Reels brought more impressions for accounts under 50K followers, while carousels did better for bigger pages.
Oct 31, 2026: Noted that Dash Social does not label its 2.7% Reels rate; it reads as per view because the report's per-follower rates run 0.1% to 0.5%. Re-read Instagram's Gifts eligibility page, which confirms creators must be 18 or older.
Frequently asked questions
How much time do people spend on Instagram Reels?
Meta said in April 2024 that Reels made up 50% of the time people spend in Instagram, up from more than 20% in April 2022. In the UK, Ofcom measured 19 minutes a day per adult Instagram user in May 2025, for the whole app.
How long can an Instagram Reel be?
Up to 20 minutes, Instagram's Help Center said in October 2026, but Reels longer than 3 minutes are not recommended to new audiences. Reels launched in August 2020 at 15 seconds.
What is the best length for a Reel?
Instagram publishes no ideal length. In Socialinsider's study of Reels posted in early 2026, 45 to 60 seconds had the highest engagement rate (0.35%) and median views. Most Shorts from the biggest YouTube channels run 60 seconds or less (82% in our count).
Do Reels get more engagement than carousels?
Per follower, no: brand carousels averaged 0.55% against 0.52% for Reels in Socialinsider's 2025 data. Per account reached, Buffer found carousels at 6.9% and Reels at 3.3%. Per view, Dash Social put Reels first at 2.7%. Reels do reach more accounts: 36 percent more than carousels in Buffer's analysis.
How much money do Reels make?
Meta said in October 2025 that Reels had an annual revenue run rate of over $50 billion. Meta does not report Reels revenue separately in its financial statements, and its 10-K says Reels still monetizes at a lower rate than Feed and Stories.
How many people use Instagram?
Instagram reached 3 billion monthly active users in September 2025, Meta said. In the U.S., 51% of adults use it (Pew, 2026), and about 225 million Americans use it each month, per testimony cited in FTC v. Meta.
Do Reels really get 22% more engagement?
The 22% came from Conviva data on 20 NBA team accounts in the first week of Reels in August 2020, comparing each team's Reels with its own Instagram videos. It was later generalised to all Reels. It is not a current or general benchmark.
