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Instagram pays creators up to $500,000 for Features videos

By Drooid · Oct 29, 2026 · How we work

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Summary

Instagram is paying creators up to $500,000 to post long videos on its Features format in United States and Brazil.
Payments under the Features agreements range from about $50,000 to $500,000 per creator.
Creators must upload the same long video to Instagram on the same day the video appears on YouTube.
Meta confirmed it is directly funding Features content but declined to disclose individual contract terms.
The trial involves a small group of creators in United States and Brazil and includes no ad-revenue sharing program.

Summary

Creators on Threads and Reddit criticized Instagram for offering no ad-revenue share on long-form Features videos.
Sidney Raskind accused Meta of “making fun” of creators by demanding free long-form uploads.
Adam Mosseri called Meta’s performance-based creator payments “ROI negative” and unsustainable at scale.
Instagram will train its AI models with uploaded Features content, a trade-off creators must accept.

History

Google funded the YouTube Original Channel Initiative in 2012 with a $100 million budget, later adding $200 million to launch dozens of creator-backed channels and test original content on the platform. After view milestones in 2012 and a 2013 shutdown, the effort highlighted the challenges of subsidizing exclusive videos—an issue echoed by Meta’s 2024 Instagram Features trial that pays creators for AI-training uploads.

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Google funded the YouTube Original Channel Initiative in 2012 with a $100 million budget, later adding $200 million to launch dozens of creator-backed channels and test original content on the platform. After view milestones in 2012 and a 2013 shutdown, the effort highlighted the challenges of subsidizing exclusive videos—an issue echoed by Meta’s 2024 Instagram Features trial that pays creators for AI-training uploads.

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