Digital Creators can now earn money on Instagram, about hundreds to thousands of dollars based on the followers, views and likes counts. Here is how it works.
Social media apps are getting upgraded to perform more tasks than its prime task – to connect with people, to letting users to earn from the platform. The advent and popularity of TikTok have forged other apps like Instagram, Twitter, YouTube to compete each other with their own way of making people to earn money from the apps, by being a digital creator.
Meta’s Instagram on the go, introduced “Stars and Gifts” feature on November 2022 which lets creators to monetize their content if they achieve a goal.
Stars and Gifts on Instagram
Instagram introduced a new way to make money from its app – Stars and Gifts. The stars and gifts feature gets automatically enabled on reels and photos of public creators, after achieving a goal, say this much of views. On sharing a reel or photo, viewers will see a ‘Send Gifts’ at the bottom of the content, where viewers can gift the stars to the creators.
By this way, fans can support the creators by sending gifts on reels and photos by purchasing virtual stars within Instagram. Yes, viewers or fans at first have to purchase stars for sending them to creators.
For example, if viewers are watching a puppy reel from a creator, they can send a dog-themed gift to the creator.
On collecting certain number of stars, creators can convert those stars to money, which they can debit directly to their bank account.
However, the feature is not for every Instagram creator, as it is now available only for selected creator accounts in US and Instagram is seeing to expand the feature to more creators across countries soon.
Eligibility
Only creators from US are considered at present for being eligible to this monetizing feature. Creators should have minimum 10K followers in their account. Creators can check their eligibility by heading to their Professional Dashboard >> Under ‘Your Tools’ >> Tap Gifts >> Tap “Allow Gifts on reels”. It allows viewers to send gifts on previously created reels or future reels. You can also tap to turn it off at any time.
If the “Tap Gifts” feature is not available in your professional dashboard, then you are not yet eligible for the gifts feature. But, don’t worry, Instagram is currently in the testing phase with selected creators and will be extending it to more creators in future.
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How Much can Creators earn from Stars and Gifts?
Instagram Creators can generate revenue from the received gifts from viewers on a monthly basis equal to $0.01 USD for every star gifted by fans. Creators can see the total and monthly approximate earnings in the Professional Dashboard. If the overall balance reaches $25 (including earnings from other monetizing programs), one can credit the amount to their bank accounts.
If you want to change your payment information, you can do this in your Payout Account. After you update your information, it will take at least 10 days to start receiving payouts, says Instagram.
How the feature works?
Instagram is approaching on a different path of generating revenue, more or less as virtual shopping, where users can purchase NFTs or digital collectibles or Stars from the app for its uses within the app.
Instagram takes a share of revenue at the time a viewer or user purchases Stars. The revenue share will vary depending on the size of the Stars pack. In addition to the revenue share, a portion of the Stars pack price also goes to the mobile platform (Apple for iOS and Google for Android). These in-app purchase fees are determined by the mobile platform and are typically 30%. Thus, Instagram pays out a part of the revenue of a Star to the creators.
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Instagram also brings features that lets creators to engage more with Stars or gifts senders like adding a filter in Comments Manager, that displays all of a creator’s stars comments in one place. As people have relied on digital marketing, digital content creation, digital influencer as a job in the today’s world, Instagram conceptualizes ways to welcome users to be creators in its app, which will be rewarding for both the firm itself and public creators.
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