Meta has started paying creators directly to publish long-form videos on Instagram. Major creators are being offered one-time contracts ranging from $50,000 to $500,000 to publish content in the new Features format.
This is how the platform is trying to attract creators to test horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long, a format launched last week.
Why creators don't want to leave YouTube
It's simply not financially worthwhile for creators to leave YouTube. The platform has a partner program that pays creators between $1 and $10 in advertising revenue for every thousand views of a long-form video.
Instagram, on the other hand, doesn't pay anything for video views themselves. If a creator can't find advertisers for direct brand integrations, they earn nothing from their videos.
Data from VidIQ analysts clearly illustrates the difference. A YouTube channel with one million subscribers earns an average of around $50,000 per month. On Instagram, a creator with the same audience earns only about $5,000 to $15,000, exclusively through third-party brand sponsorships.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri has already acknowledged this problem on Threads, stating that creator earnings are what matter most, and that the team is currently exploring options for ongoing payments to long-form video creators.
Repeating the mistakes of the IGTV era
But attracting creators with one-time bonuses won't work in the long run. Meta already used exactly the same approach when launching IGTV, offering creators large contracts and promising to allocate a billion dollars to reward them.
Those payments didn't save the situation back then. Creators accepted the offered amounts but stopped producing long-form videos as soon as the budgets ran out. Eventually, the standalone IGTV app was simply shut down.
Until the platform introduces a permanent partner program that shares advertising revenue with creators, like YouTube does, even payments of half a million dollars will have only a short-term effect.
