As our latest chart shows, Facebook is late to join the parade of tech companies offering to pay creators for showing up on their platforms. It’s making up for that latecomer status in size—and variety. 

Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram will pay social media creators $1 billion through 2022, one of the largest direct financial incentives offered by tech companies to creators. Influencers, who must be invited to participate, can earn money by posting to Instagram’s short-form video tool Reels or by reaching certain milestones, such as broadcasting on Facebook for a certain number of hours or going live with another account. Creators will get bonuses when signing up for IGTV ads, which allows them to earn revenue from ads running on their videos. Facebook will also provide an undisclosed amount of “seed funding” for creators to produce content. 

The rollout roughly corresponds to what Instagram head Adam Mosseri had told us in May: that he was open to a creator fund, but would prefer to offer more sustainable revenue streams. “I’m personally more bullish and excited about building monetization products that help them make a living over the long-run than I am about writing checks directly, but I'm not opposed to writing checks,” Mosseri said then.

The question for Facebook and its rivals? If creators will stay once the checks stop.