Social media giant, Meta is halting its program of paying bonuses to creators for making Reels that hit certain marks.
The program encouraged content creators to produce more brief video content when it was first offered in 2021.
The Instagram program was only open to producers residing in the U.S., therefore the shutdown will affect all Reels creators on Instagram and Facebook.
The program’s cancellation, which was first reported by Business Insider, suggests that platforms want to stop compensating creators based on how well-liked their short films are.
According to the article, Meta will continue to honor any bonus commitments for a period of 30 days.
Given that short videos are currently one of the most popular content types on social media, Meta is certainly attempting to rake in advertising dollars.
In addition to showing in-stream advertisements, it also expanded its overlay ads trial to producers in more than 50 countries last year.
The corporation gives the designers of both of these ad formats a 55% cut of the profits.
Reels have a $1 billion annual income rate, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s statement from last year.
Yet, the business would like to see the format bring in more revenue while it spends money on metaverse initiatives.
Reels aren’t yet earning enough money, according to Zuckerberg, who stated this on the investor call for Meta’s Q4 2022 results.
“The next bottleneck that we are focused on to continue growing Reels is improving monetization efficiency or the revenue that’s generated per minute of Reels watched. Currently, the monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So the more that Reels grows, even though it adds engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money,” he said.
Creators would need incentives to post short videos on Meta’s platforms rather than TikTok or YouTube Shorts since the business is discontinuing bonuses. Facebook has pledged to provide creators with new monetization opportunities so they can make money on Reels.