iWorld
Meta expands Facebook Reels to over 150 countries globally
Mumbai: Meta has announced the availability of Facebook Reels for iOS and Android to more than 150 countries across the globe. The company is also introducing better ways to help creators to earn money, new creative tools and more places to watch and create Facebook Reels.
“Watching video is half of time spent on Facebook and Instagram, and Reels is our fastest growing content format by far. We’re focused on making Reels the best way for creators to get discovered, connect with their audience and earn money. We also want to make it fun and easy for people to find and share relevant and entertaining content,” said Meta in a statement.
Facebook Reels will be available in Feed, Groups and Watch. When viewing a reel, users can follow the creator directly from the video, like and comment on it or share it with friends. Meta is exploring ways to make it easier for creators to share Reels to both their Facebook and Instagram audiences, such as crossposting.
With this move, the company is creating a variety of opportunities for creators to earn money for their reels. The Reels Play bonus program, part of its $ one billion creator investment, pays eligible creators up to $35,000 a month based on the views of their qualifying reels. These bonuses have helped creators fund their reels creation and better understand what types of content works on Facebook. In the coming months, the bonus program will be extended to more countries.
Building on deep experience in helping creators earn meaningful income from its monetisation products like in-stream ads and Stars, Meta is also building direct monetisation options for Facebook Reels through ad revenue share and fan support.
“We’re expanding tests of Facebook Reels Overlay Ads to all creators in the US, Canada and Mexico, and to more countries in the coming weeks. We’re starting with two formats: banner ads that appear as a semi-transparent overlay at the bottom of a Facebook Reel, and sticker ads: a static image ad that can be placed by a creator anywhere within their reel. These non-interruptive ads enable creators to earn a portion of the ad revenue,” said the statement.
Any creator in the US, Canada and Mexico who is part of the in-stream ads program is automatically eligible to monetise their publicly-shared reels with ads. By mid-March, these tests will expand to creators in nearly all countries where in-stream ads are available.
Meta will also begin testing Stars on Facebook Reels in the coming weeks, so that people can buy and send them while watching reels to support creators. Both overlay ads and Stars are designed so that as more people view and engage with Reels on Facebook, creator payouts can grow.
Brand suitability controls, including Publisher Lists, Blocklists, Inventory Filters and Delivery Reports for Banner and Sticker Ads in Facebook will be launched shortly. Reels in every region they are available, give advertisers more control over how their ads appear in places they don’t consider suitable for their brand or campaign. The company has been testing full-screen and immersive ads in between Facebook Reels since last October, and will roll them out to more places around the world over the coming months. Just like with organic content on Facebook, people can comment, like, view, save, share and skip them.
In addition to the features announced last year, creators around the world will be able to access:
·Remix: Create their own reel alongside an existing, publicly-shared reel on Facebook.
·60-second Reels: Make reels up to 60 seconds long.
·Drafts: Create a reel and choose to “Save As Draft” below the Save button.
·Video Clipping: In the coming months, video clipping tools that will make it easier for creators who publish live or long-form, recorded videos to test different formats will be rolled out.
Over the coming weeks, following updates will be introduced to make it easier to create and discover reels in new places:
·Reels in Stories: Share public reels to Stories on Facebook, making it easy to share favourite reels with friends and giving creators more visibility and reach. Creators will also be able to create reels from existing public stories.
·Reels in Watch: Watch reels directly within the Watch tab. Tools to help create reels in the Watch tab are in the offing
·Top of Feed: New Reels label at the top of feed to easily create and watch reels in just a few clicks.
·Suggested Reels in Feed: Available in select countries, it will suggest reels that users may like in their Feed from people they do not already follow.
Since launching in the US last September, Facebook Reels has seen creators like Kurt Tocci (and his cat, Zeus) share original comedic skits, author and Bulletin writer Andrea Gibson offer a reading of their published poetry, Nigerian-American couple Ling and Lamb try new foods, and dancer and creator Niana Guerrero do trending dances, like the #ZooChallenge.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
