David Bridges
More than 2.2 lakh people in India have registered on Facebook-parent Meta’s ‘Born on Instagram’ creator education programme since its launch three years ago, the company revealed at a creator meet-up session in Mumbai on Friday, indicating the growing interest in the influencer economy.
“We want to really lean into investing in creator education as well. The creator programme called ‘Born on Instagram’ launched an online learning module for anyone in India to access learning modules for free and get certified in the process. Today, over 2.2 lakh creators have registered for it. The courses are available in seven languages,” said Ajit Mohan, VP and MD, India (Meta).
The session, one in a series which have already been organised in cities such as Kochi and Lucknow, saw over 500 people, including content creators gather for a meet-up. Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh and popular Tanzanian Instagram influencer Kili Paul also entertained the audience by dancing together.
“We are seeing excitement for different format of Reels. Because we’ve started doing even longer format videos that can be Reels like travel vlogs and cooking videos, a lot of new formats are coming,” Manish Chopra, Head of Partnerships, Facebook India (Meta), told Business Today without revealing further details.
The social media company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, has been vocal about its keenness on shorter videos, specifically user-generated videos of up to a minute long called Instagram Reels, an India-first product launched in 2020.
Essentially, it is betting on videos to push its ads. India is a voracious consumer of videos, with a smartphone user spending an hour on average watching videos every day, according to a Bain & Company report titled Online videos in India – The long and short of it. And at the core of Instagram’s shorter format videos are content creators and influencers. Today, the influencer economy is estimated at Rs 900 crore.
To tap into more creators, Meta in India is running programmes like ‘Born on Instagram’, ‘25 Under 25 Instagrammers of India’, and has also set up a Centre for Fuelling New Economy at its new office in Gurugram where it has said it will train 250,000 creators (and 10 million small businesses) in three years.
Both Meta and the content creators get paid by the advertisers.
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Cameron Steel
