Meta confirmed it through the official Instagram account this week, and Meta for Business has since amplified the figure: Reels now accounts for 50% of all time people spend on Instagram, according to Meta. Monthly viewership has reached 2 billion users.
This isn't a trend to watch. It's where the platform already is. Reels has been growing as a share of Instagram consumption since 2020, and it has crossed the majority of time spent. Half the attention on Instagram — at minimum — is going to short-form video.
Most creative briefs haven't caught up.
The reach gap between video and static
Reels reach non-followers at a rate that static formats don't. Social Media Today, citing Meta data, reports that around 55% of Reels views come from accounts that don't follow the brand. Static posts surface primarily to existing audiences. Reels acts as a discovery surface.
Meta's own data, as reported by CNBC in January 2026, shows that over 50% of all Instagram ads ran on Reels in 2025 — up from 35% in 2024. The platform shifted the weight of ad delivery toward video even as most brand creative teams were still commissioning static-first assets.
Reels also pull more than twice the organic reach of carousels and static images, according to eMarketer's analysis of Meta data. The gap between what Reels earns and what static earns has been widening consistently for two years.
The platform is already compensating for your brief
You may not be deliberately running Reels ads. Meta may be running them anyway.
If your campaigns have Advantage+ placements enabled and you're not supplying vertical video, Meta takes your static assets, reformats them, and serves them on Reels inventory. The resulting performance — click-through rates, cost per conversion — reflects a static creative on a video surface. It performs below what a native Reels format would.
Mark Zuckerberg confirmed in Meta's Q3 2025 earnings call that Reels across Instagram and Facebook had crossed a $50 billion annual run rate. That's what advertisers are spending on the surface. The creative quality on that surface is a separate variable, and it varies significantly by account.
If your ad account is spending on Reels and you're not briefing for it, those two facts are not separate from each other.
The briefing gap is the real problem
The bottleneck for most brands isn't awareness that Reels matters. It's that production workflows still treat video as an adaptation of static.
A static brief has clear inputs: dimensions, copy, key message, call to action. A Reels brief requires thinking differently from the start. The hook has to be in the first frame — not the fifth. The message has to be carried by text overlay for viewers watching without sound, which is a significant portion of mobile viewership. The composition is vertical. The execution looks native to the surface, not like a banner reformatted to 9:16.
Brands performing well on Reels are not running TV cutdowns repurposed for vertical. They're briefing against the format constraints from the start. If your agency or in-house team is still delivering static with a note to "cut a video version," the performance data in your Reels placements reflects that workflow, not the potential of the placement.
What to audit right now
Pull up your active ad sets in Meta Ads Manager and look at the creative type breakdown. If the majority of your running ads are static image or carousel, and Advantage+ placements are on, Meta is already serving those assets on Reels inventory below their potential efficiency.
If you're running manual placements and have excluded Reels because you don't have vertical video, you've excluded the placement that captures half of all time on Instagram.
Two things to check: what percentage of your active ads are vertical video formatted for Reels, and whether your creative briefs are calling for Reels-native execution or repurposed assets. The answer to those two questions explains most of the performance gap on Reels placements in most accounts.
The audit doesn't require any tool. It requires looking at what you're actually running versus where your delivery is going.
If you want to see where your Meta budget is landing versus where it's performing, the free audit at gromerce.com/audit surfaces the mismatch in under three minutes.
Reels is half the app. Brief it accordingly.
Sources: Meta for Business, Social Media Today, eMarketer, Meta Q3 2025 earnings
