Popular social media platform Instagram has announced the slashing of payouts for short videos after major content creators complained of a significant reduction in pay amounts, Financial Times reports. The reports suggest that payments are down by as much as 70% per video view and the short videos need much more views for creators to get paid.
In July, Meta announced the Reels Play Bonus Program, a program that offers financial rewards to content creators who post on Reels, Instagram’s short-video style similar to TikTok. The bonus program which is part of a promise by Meta, owners of Instagram, to pay $1 billion to content creators through 2022 has seen a huge hit as payouts which ranged from $600 to as much as $35,000 have been cut down significantly.
Influencers and content creators complained about this payment cut-down claiming the company did not provide an explanation for the decision. A user specifically told the Financial Times that their personalized threshold for getting paid up to $35,000 had gone from 58 million views to 359 million views.
Meta told the Financial Times that the company was testing Reels bonuses on Instagram and Facebook, which may cause payouts to “fluctuate” as pricing models are refined.
Instagram, with an aim to challenge its competitor, began the program in 2021 as TikTok was seeing sustained popularity. Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has blamed TikTok for stealing attention from Facebook and his company’s other social media apps. Reels Play Bonus Program is invite-only and available for some users in the U.S and the Financial Times reports that Meta lost over $220 billion from its market valuation in February, a period which correlates with when users were spending more time on TikTok.
