Instagram Has No Plan to Pay Long-Form Video Creators

Instagram is testing a long-form video format called Features, but the company has not set out a plan to pay creators who use it. After Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced Features, creators raised concerns on Threads and Reddit about the lack of monetization compared with YouTube’s ad revenue sharing and performance-based incentives.

In a Threads post, Mosseri said Instagram understands that creator economics matter and is exploring multiple ways to help long-form creators get paid. He did not specify what those options might be. The test currently involves a small group of creators in the US and Brazil. Features videos can run for up to 90 minutes, compared with a 20-minute maximum for Reels, and appear focused on landscape video.

Meta offers some monetization tools for Reels, but they do not pay creators directly per view. Meta also ended Facebook’s former ad revenue-sharing payout model in 2024, replacing it with a performance-based system.

Mosseri said on a podcast that pre-roll or mid-roll ads could hurt the user experience. He also said expanding Meta’s existing performance-based program would not make sense because the company spends more on it than it earns back. Instagram’s main incentives for creators, he said, are brand payments and, for some, payments from fans. The Verge reports that posting Features videos also means Meta will use them to train its AI models.