Instagram May Be Considering Partnering With Influencers On Revenue Share In IGTV

Instagram may, finally, share a bit of its $20 billion advertisement income with content makers. First spotted by Hong Kong-based designer Jane Manchun Wong, who figures out applications to uncover unreleased features, she said the social media giant is testing a monetisation service in Instagram TV popularly called IGTV – the service that allows for longer videos in Instagram.

The new service is dubbed Instagram Partner Program, it is modelled after what its parent company Facebook does with content creators with Watch in that eligible influencers and content creators will be able to earn some money by running short video ads in videos. Like its other video-based service, Instagram will have set criteria to choose which accounts are eligible for this. So, this could be determined by the number of watch hours an influencer’s video accumulates vis-a-vis their number of followers. Sometimes it can be that you are required to have a certain number of followers who have watched their videos over a period of time.

We know also that Facebook and YouTube for example have different ways of measuring what they consider a recorded video count.

The new service is dubbed as Instagram Partner Program, it is modelled after what its parent company Facebook does with content creators in that eligible influencers and content creators will be able to earn some money by running short video ads in videos. Like its other video-based service, Instagram will have set criteria to choose which accounts are eligible for this. So, this could be determined by the number of watch hours an influencer’s video accumulates vis-a-vis their number of followers. Sometimes it can be that you are required to have a certain number of followers who have watched their videos over a period of time.

We know also that Facebook and YouTube for example have different ways of measuring what they consider a recorded video count. YouTube is believed to have a higher standard for views count than its contenders like Facebook, Snapchat and now Instagram such that it only records a view after 30 seconds unlike 3 seconds count that Facebook reportedly uses back in 2017. That has all changed now with Facebook though.

Business Pages on Facebook need to have at least 10,000 followers and 30,000 1-minute views on videos over the most recent 60 days for a Page or account to cash off videos.  The YouTube Partner Program on the other hand expects content creators to have in excess of 4,000 legitimate public views in the past one year and in addition the account must have at least a thousand subscribers.

On the way money will be split between Instagram and influencers, there is no fixed method as of now but I would expect that they would go the Facebook way. The social media giant currently allows creators earn a 55 percent cut from ads while Facebook keeps the rest. Facebook raked in about $71b in ad revenue in 2019 alone and is actively considering monetising WhatsApp at some point.