Instagram To Pay Creators Up to $500K For Long-Form Videos

Instagram wants creators to bring their long videos over from YouTube, and it’s opening its wallet to make that happen. It’s reportedly offering select creators anywhere from $50,000 to $500,000 to post on Features, Instagram’s new long-form video format.

Business Insider learned about the deals from people familiar with them. However, not every creator is getting the same offer. Some have been offered $50,000, while others got six-figure deals, with some reportedly reaching half a million dollars.

Meta didn’t deny it. “We’ve been public about the fact that we are funding Features content directly with some creators right now to support them,” a Meta spokesperson told Business Insider. “The details of those deals are confidential, but we’re excited to see the content going live.”

A Quick Recap

If you missed it, we covered the testing of Features last week. It’s a new format for horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long. At the moment, it’s still in the testing stage with a small group of creators in Brazil and the US. Creators can link Reels clips to a full-length video, so viewers can jump from a short teaser straight to the whole thing. Instagram is also pushing onto TVs, including Apple TV in the US.

The big question at the time was money. Unlike YouTube, Instagram has no revenue-sharing program for these videos, and that hasn’t changed. An Instagram rep told Variety that “it’s too early to share a long-term monetization model.” So, for now, the plan seems to be: pay a handful of creators directly, fill Features with content, and figure out the rest later.

According to the rep, Instagram is exploring “ways for creators to earn from brands, fans and Instagram, including performance-based incentives.” They add that, over time, there will be “compounding benefits for creators to tell new stories, reach new audiences, and find new partners, which should lead to many monetization opportunities.” So, yeah. In other words, “we’ll figure it out.”

Can Money Buy Instagram a Piece of YouTube?

In short: I don’t think so, at least not a big one. A $500,000 deal is a lot of money, and I understand why some creators would take it. But it’s a one-off payment to a few hand-picked people, not a system the average creator can rely on. YouTube’s Partner Program pays creators a share of ad revenue on every eligible video, for as long as that video keeps getting views. A tutorial uploaded five years ago can still earn money today. That’s hard to compete with Instagram’s plan, if we can call this one-time payment a plan at all.

More importantly, YouTubers have spent years building their audiences on YouTube. Their subscribers are there, their back catalogs are there, and their viewers search for videos there. Moving to Instagram (or even splitting time between the two) means starting from zero with a format Instagram users aren’t used to watching. A short Reel that points to a 40-minute video might drive some clicks, but someone scrolling Instagram on their lunch break isn’t necessarily in the mood for a 40-minute anything.

What Instagram could realistically get is a slice of the “clip economy”: creators who already post short clips on Reels and might put the full version on Instagram too, as long as someone pays them for the trouble. That’s not nothing, but it’s a long way from taking a chunk out of YouTube.

What do you think? If Instagram offered you a deal, would you move your long videos there, or would you keep YouTube as your main home? Let me know in the comments.

[via CineD, Business Insider, Variety]

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