Instagram is reportedly offering some creators up to $500,000 to post long-form content as it looks for new ways to drive interest in its latest content experiment.
Last week, Instagram announced initial testing of its new Features option, which will let creators post videos of up to 90 minutes.
Yet despite providing the capacity to share longer videos, creators don’t have much incentive to do so because YouTube’s Partner Program offers significantly more potential to earn money from that content.
Instagram Chief Adam Mosseri has acknowledged this, and said in a Threads post on Thursday that “the economics matter a ton,” and that he and his team are exploring multiple options to help long-form creators get paid.
According to Business Insider, the first effort on that front is a series of one-off payments to big-name stars.
As per BI: “The Meta-owned platform has offered select creators $50,000 to post long-form video to its new ‘Features’ product, while others have been offered six-figure deals, some of which have reached $500,000.”
Meta didn’t confirm or deny the details. Instead, a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider that Meta is “funding Features content directly with some creators,” and that it’s “excited to see the content going live."
Which suggests that this will be a significant part of its new long-form push. Though Meta should know better than anyone that this type of upfront payment process won’t drive ongoing interest or adoption.
That’s because Meta has done this before. The company offered creators big money deals in the past to post to its long-form content option IGTV.
As reported by SMT sister publication Marketing Dive in 2021, Meta said it would pay out $1 billion to creators in 2022, including special payments to creators who allowed ads in their IGTV content, in order to boost interest in posting long-form videos in the app.
That didn’t raise user interest in the option, and by early 2022, Meta was already moving to shut down the separate IGTV app.
Other platforms have tried similar one-off payment approaches to entice creators to post longer clips. Earlier this year X offered a $175k prize for users who used Grok to generate their own version of “The Odyssey” movie.
Generally, these types of promotions lead to a spike in posts related to the promotion. But in most cases, they don’t spark a sustainable increase in video content posting or consumption.
Maybe Instagram has a better plan in place this time, but without a sustainable revenue share system in place, it’s hard to see the platform’s new long-form option appealing to a lot of creators.
According to analysis conducted by VidIQ, YouTube’s ad revenue share model generally pays creators between $1 and $10 per 1,000 long-form views. By comparison, Instagram monetization based on views alone is “effectively zero” without a brand deal attached. VidIQ said the creators with more than a million subscribers in each app earn, on average, around $50,000 per month on YouTube, and between $5,000 and $15,000 on IG.
