It’s the week every influencer, business, and creative content creator yearly waits for – Meta’s Creator Week. A week dedicated to pushing innovative content, Meta announced some amazing new monetization features for creators to kick start the week off with helpful tools to reap the rewards of generating active engagement. Monetization opportunities to enable creators to up their game, sell NFTs and for the first time receive valuable gifts from followers, similar to TikTok.
First and foremost, Instagram announced it would be making fan subscriptions available to all eligible creators, currently limited to the US only, which will enable a lot of users to monetize their Instagram audience via direct, ongoing support from their communities.
What do IG Fan subscriptions entail?
Back in January, when Instagram first launched fan subscriptions with a handful of selected creators in the US before making it available to the general US public during Creator Week, the concept behind the service was and still is part of its expanding suite of creator monetization tools designed to keep users generating the biggest engagement aligned to the app.
With subscriptions, creators (with over 10k followers) are able to charge a monthly fee – between $0.99 and $99.99 – which then gives paying members access to subscribers-only live streams, subscribers-only posts, and Stories and badges in comment streams to help creators identify their supporters.
Generating target-specific content for fan subscribers enables influencers and creators to build a niche community online that makes users feel they are receiving “exclusive content.” However, it is important to remember that influencers should create a balance between “exclusive content” and “free content” in order to maintain a steady growth of subscribed users.
Currently, Instagram takes no cut from subscriber revenue, though any fees paid are subject to Google and Apple’s 30% in fees for in-app purchases. Anything outside of that means that all the money raised will be fully yours, which provides another alley for creators to make money from their IG content.
Creator Week introduces gift sharing
Similar to TikTok gift sharing via live streams, Instagram launched new ways for fans to send money in the form of virtual gifts to admired creators in Instagram Reels. As a result, this will enable viewers to either fund, gift, or support Reel creators, which then allocate the cost of that gift as a donation.
Meta’s gift sharing in Reels is the same concept as Facebook Stars, although, in a different form, the virtual gifts on Instagram are more illustrative, animated gift types which could potentially draw more attention, attraction, and higher engagement to not only the platform itself but to individual creator’s accounts as well.
Meta stated that the gift sharing is still in the testing phase, but as a means to promote Creator Week they rolled out the feature all over the US, to begin with, before considering broader expansion.
In addition to Meta’s multiple rollouts of new monetization features for Creator Week, if we look at Facebook, also Stars would enable creators to access fan donations, making it possible for supporters to allocate money to you during videos and live streams.
Meta’s also testing automatic Stars onboarding for creators, meaning the ability to receive Stars will automatically appear on their content, while it’s also making Stars available on photo and text posts, in addition to videos, live streams, and Reels
“Stars Party is a celebratory moment that happens when a spike of Stars are sent from your fans on live or reels. When the spike occurs, an overlay with a countdown will appear on the screen with progress toward a goal, encouraging fans to send Stars and meet the Stars goal.”
Meta’s Creator Week further expands monetization tools by introducing NFT sales
Lastly, Meta’s looking to lean further into NFTs and digital art, via new processes which will enable users to both create and sell NFTs within Instagram. In an official statement, Meta announced that creators would have ‘an end-to-end toolkit’ to facilitate NFT trading, with fans and collectors able to purchase digital collectibles directly within Instagram.
There is a true niche to explore from communities interested in investing in artwork as collectible pieces, and as such, it makes sense for Instagram to lean into this, and facilitate engagement for the NFT community. At the same time, Meta’s also eyeing a bigger user case for the underlying NFT process, in trading virtual items and digital goods that could theoretically be used and displayed within the metaverse.
Ultimately the kickoff of Creator Week has exceeded expectations of the introduction of new tools as the innovative incentives for creators contribute to Meta’s broader strategy to generate higher user engagement. Greater monetization opportunities for creators would entail that they continue posting, generating engagement, reach, and maintaining Meta’s stronghold as the biggest social media company.
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