Instagram Reels vs Youtube Shorts: Who Wins?
Instagram Reels vs Youtube Shorts: The clashes between social media have been occurring for a long time with various similar features getting added to the various social media sites. In today’s generation, we have various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Youtube, Pinterest and so many more. Social media’s general purpose is to be able to connect people by connecting over a network that has various users under it. However, just under the purpose of connecting people comes one of the largest reasons why social media sites are still thriving to this day. That reason is the sharing and consumption of content daily. As of recently, it has been estimated that daily around 34 GBs of data is being consumed by an average human being.
Today we’ll be comparing one of the most recent yet the most rapidly growing means of media content recently which is short-video sharing. Although it started up from the dead social media site “Vine” the concept was quickly taken up by TikTok (formerly known as Musical.ly), now we have various social media platforms sharing the same concept on their app and people are indeed using it as an alternative way. Let’s discuss the leading sites that have been utilizing the concept: Instagram and Youtube.
Also Read: How Instagram degraded Facebook (Instagram vs Facebook)
Instagram has been a social media to share photos and videos since October 2010. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. It was acquired by Facebook Inc. (now Meta) in the year 2012 and was able to gain access to all the services and data from Instagram. Instagram allows users to export media from user’s phone gallery, edit it and then post it on the platform for their friends and family or for public display depending upon the type of account they have which may be either a private account or a public account. Instagram has been a source of entertainment and content-feeding service for many years.
Instagram recently launched a new form of media creation in the year 2020 and named it Instagram “Reels”. This was a direct response and competition to the immensely popular Chinese short-video creation and media app “TikTok”. Instagram initially had reels with just 15 seconds in length and eventually upgraded it. People were able to share it with their friends and family by just using the DMs. Currently, around 2 billion people interact with or use reels as a form of content making.
Instagram also uses the concept of hashtags for being able to classify videos in various categories and try to catch them in the algorithm. Looking at the current stats of Instagram reels, these are not going to die any time soon and have most definitely been a huge success in comparison to IGTV which Instagram had.
Youtube
Youtube is a social media and video-sharing app owned by Google, launched in the year 2005. It was created by Its headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States, it quickly crawled onto the mainstream for media consumption as it was the first video-sharing app with the features it provided of the era. The site went on to gain a lot of users currently having 122 million users using the site or app every day.
To compete with other social media platforms, Youtube also released a form of short video-sharing format on its app as it felt the urge to not hold itself down while the other sites have been causing Youtube’s traditional longer videos to be falling behind in the era of fast entertainment. But, as Instagram reels have accessibility to be able to share the content with friends and family directly, Youtube lacking in the case of not having a DM section lacks behind as you’d have to share a hyperlink to share entertainment. A little less than Instagram, nonetheless a big number, Youtube has now confirmed that around 1.5 billion people use Youtube Shorts in a month.
Conclusion – Instagram Reels vs Youtube Shorts
Although the opinion can be very subjective based on the consumer and the content creator, Instagram reels are supposed to be better as it has much more accessibility and is simpler than being able to create a Youtube Short. Instagram also allows to use of various video templates from reels being made directly on the app and not a collage video on another app and then exported onto Instagram with the sound added and then posted. It is also straightforward to share Instagram reels making it easier to share media on the app for both reasons, whether to a large mass or privately. Hence, we conclude this debate by declaring Instagram Reels as the clear winner.