During an invite-only virtual event on Wednesday, Meta spoke to creators about how to use Facebook to grow an audience, manage a community, and earn money from their content. The event is part of a longer season of panels Meta is hosting called Creator Conversations.
In doing so, and despite mothering the largest creator platform, Instagram, Meta is making one thing clear: Facebook is not dead.
“I definitely felt like it was like an olive branch that Facebook was offering to creators,” said Lia Haberman, an adjunct professor at UCLA who attended the event.
Kristen Bousquet, a content creator with 24,000 Instagram followers, also tuned in and left the event with the takeaway that it couldn’t hurt to cross-post her content on Facebook. “With the possibility that it’s going to make me even a tiny bit of money, I don’t see the harm in trying,” Bousquet told Insider in a direct message.
While younger generations and users like myself barely touch the platform, it must not be forgotten that, as of March, Facebook boasts 2 billion daily active users. As a result, Meta aims to pitch Facebook as a solution for content creators with particular focus on showcasing its creator ad-revenue-share model, called Ads on Facebook reels.
One creator, Chien-Ying Yu spoke during Meta’s April event as well, where she discussed perks for turning on Facebook’s “Professional Mode,” the introduction of ads on Facebook reels, and answered questions from the audience.
“They’re making a push so that Facebook’s not forgotten by creators,” Haberman told Insider. “Especially with everything recently between YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, Facebook never gets mentioned in those same conversations when we talk about creators and what platforms they’re choosing between.”
Furthermore, according to various sources, Facebook’s ad-revenue-share model is the most generous in the game alongside YouTube.
As other platforms axe creator funds in exchange for ad-revenue sharing, Meta is following suit. How Meta will approach any revenue splits on reels, however, has been a hot-button debate. Facebook currently offers two ad formats on reels: overlay ads and post-loop ads. Overlay ads appear as pop-ups on a reel, while post-loop ads appear after a reel has been played more than once.
Last year, when Meta first announced it would begin testing ads on reels, the company said it would apply the same revenue split it had been using on longer-form videos via Facebook’s in-stream ad program: 55% to creators and 45% to Facebook.
