Meta’s glitzy parties reflect high stakes in TikTok-free India

More than 500 content creators had gathered to network with fellow influencers in an upscale convention center littered with white bean bags and Instagram-able shop facades. It was Meta’s biggest-ever Creator Day in India, celebrating the millions here who use Reels to post short-videos of everything from songs and dance to home décor to cooking on Instagram.

“Make no mistake, we’re reaching out to a lot more creators in a lot more cities,” Mohan said, sporting a casual white shirt paired with an oversized watch of the same color, light blue denims and red shoes.

Ranveer Singh, the enthusiastic and lively Bollywood star, soon joined Mohan onstage while crooning one of his hip-hop hits. The actor swayed from side to side, dressed in hot pink overalls, as fans rushed near him to take selfies.

But behind the fun and games is serious business. Meta is fighting a TikTok problem in its home market of the US where the ByteDance Ltd.-owned app’s popularity is laying waste to Mark Zuckerberg’s ad revenue model. Meta was losing the big followings it needed on Instagram to attract more spending on ads.

And then, India
threw out TikTok in the summer of 2020 after a border clash with China. Meta has since
supercharged efforts to woo creators and influencers such as Singh, with Instagram deploying a significant part of a more than $1 billion global budget in India, where it has roughly 400 million users — more than anywhere in the world.

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Investing in the South Asian nation to win over creators comes with the promise of a nearly $20 billion market, which carries the best growth potential for online video on the planet.

That’s why Meta’s teams scout for budding talent across the length and breadth of this country. Take
Sanjana Das for example, who’s got just over 41,000 followers on Instagram where she posts cooking videos. The former PR professional quit her job two years ago and now her Instagram videos are making money – she won a deal with a prominent Indian manufacturer of food processors. Or 37-year-old
Rohina Anand Khira whose Reels helped her home décor business surge and whose Instagram videos helped her win a year-long contract with
Intel Corp.

Both were at the gala to meet fellow creators and attend sessions hosted by star influencers who advised their audience to follow their hearts while making videos and ignore the trolls.

And with perseverence, the money will come,
Saransh Goila, an Indian chef with an Instagram following of 655,000 users, told creators at one such session. “Sometimes I work with a brand I don’t believe in if they hire me for a year and pay me a lot of money,” he quipped.

The fluorescent purple and green lights cast an otherworldly hue on the entire venue, and I thought about how the setting perfectly captured the painstaking effort of what hipsters so casually call “collab.” The center where the shindig took place was built by Meta’s billionaire partner Mukesh Ambani’s
Reliance Industries Ltd. That alliance, forged in 2020 when Meta spent $5.7 billion to buy a 10% stake in Reliance’s digital unit, made shopping possible over WhatsApp.

In that spirit of collab and to get more content creators hooked on Reels, Meta will host four more Creator Days this year.

“We knew that Reels would be blossoming and vibrant if it were championed by a vibrant creator community,” said Nicola Mendelsohn, Vice President of Global Business Group at Meta. “We found it here in Mumbai, here in India.”