According to the marketing director of the influence agency Billion Dollar Boy, “[The data] indicates that Instagram has become the biggest beneficiary of the TikTok disruption in the United States.”
Can the American competitor of TikTok take advantage of the controversy around the TikTok Ban and its legal setbacks to become the No. 1 platform for short videos? Instagram recently chose to increase the price of the sponsored Reels format, being now almost alone in the advertising short video market, while implementing a strategy to recruit TikTok influencers.
Instagram, users' favorite social network
The historical strength of Instagram is obviously its massive use. But it is also the preferred platform in the world by users of social networks.
According to a GWI study conducted at the end of 2024, Instagram is also the preferred social media platform, with 16% of respondents saying they prefer it over others, compared to 8.1% for TikTok, which ranks fifth, behind Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook and WeChat.
Having become even more popular on the advertising market, the platform takes the opportunity to make advertisers pay.
According to advertising data from Meta and TikTok, there was an increase of more than 3% in advertising reach for Instagram in the last quarter of 2024 compared to the previous quarter. On the other hand, for the same period, TikTok shows a drop of almost 6%. This is explained in particular by the instability of the future of the platform in the United States.
Indeed, during the third quarter of 2024, TikTok had an increase of 5.4% in its advertising reach while it was only 0.7% for Instagram.
The Meta platform has therefore obviously taken advantage of TikTok's legal weakness at least occasionally.
Calla Murphy, vice president at Belardi Wong (marketing agency), explains that CPMs on Meta have increased since January 2025, showing a growing interest in Instagram. CPMs increased by 20%, from $10 to $12, with an increase of up to 40% between January 7 and 19. In February, prices fell slightly to $11.70. This increase is most likely due to the readjustment of advertising budgets, with some advertisers transferring their expenses from TikTok to Meta due to TikTok news.
According to eMarketer, Instagram's advertising revenue in the United States currently exceeds $32 billion, compared to $11 billion for TikTok. In 2025, they are expected to increase by 16% compared to the previous year, an increase of 5.1 billion dollars, to a total of 37.13 billion dollars.
In the third quarter of 2024, Reels represented a record 19% of impressions on Instagram. Projections indicate that by 2025, more than a quarter of Instagram's advertising revenue will come from Reels and other ad formats outside of Feed and Stories.
The seduction operation to attract TikTok creators
Recent data from Digiday reveals a surge in content creation on Instagram Reels after the TikTok ban, with a 16% increase in creator posts. There is also stronger engagement and an increase in subscribers, especially for leading creators such as MrBeast.
TikTok, for its part, saw a slight drop in posts (3%) and a 9% drop in average views per video.
The advertisers are mixed, with some cautiously resuming their investments on TikTok, while others prefer to maintain their withdrawal for the time being.
Meta has also continued to offer new features to users and has been trying to recruit TikTok creators with attractive offers since last December. For example, Instagram launched its Test Reals, allowing you to test content with non-subscribers. Since January, the length of the videos has been extended to 3 minutes, up from 1 minute and 30 minutes previously. Additionally, Instagram is looking to make its own creative tool, similar to TikTok's CapCut, popular by developing Edit.
According to Business Insider, Meta intends to recruit the biggest creators of TikTok by offering bonuses to TikTok creators worth up to $300,000 over 6 months.
Payments would range from $2,500 to $50,000 per month and would require the content to be exclusive to Instagram for three months.
It is true that Tiktok has returned to application stores in the United States since February 13 and continues to attract brands, but the obligation remains and ByteDance must sell its American operations by February 1Er April 2025.
In the meantime, this period remains favorable for Meta, which continues to innovate to attract both brands and creators, with even more visible results during this wave of lows for TikTok.
