Meta is reportedly on its hands and knees, begging influencers to use Instagram instead of TikTok.
According to a new report from The Information, Instagram is offering creators monthly bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 for posting their videos on Instagram Reels before posting them on other platforms, including TikTok. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mashable.
It's unclear what kind of a lasting impact this will have on creators. Meta has attempted to draw creators onto its platform with promises of financial gains before, but those incentives were always temporary. For instance, the platform got rid of its Reels Play bonus program, a similar program to TikTok's Creator Fund, that left creators looking for new ways to find the additional $500-$1,000 they had counted on each month. This newly reported bribe or, whoops, sorry, "incentive" doesn't seem to promise longevity, either.
It's not the only step Instagram has taken over the past few days to attract users away from TikTok. Square grids have been replaced with rectangles to prioritize short-form videos like Reels in a highly polarizing move that most creators don't like. Instagram also released a new video editing app called Edits, which was seemingly unveiled specifically to rival TikTok's CapCut. The app extended the maximum length of Reels to three minutes.
This comes after Meta gave its all to ensure that TikTok gets banned in the U.S. But, unfortunately for Meta, the payoff of its hard work and lobbying was short-lived. After less than a full day of being offline over the weekend, TikTok returned — for now. It's still absent from U.S. app stores, but if you didn't delete the app from your phone, you can still access new videos, and all users can find what they're looking for on the desktop version of TikTok.
Meanwhile, many creators are uninterested in pivoting their attention to Meta-owned platforms after CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a new decision to bend at the knee of President Donald Trump's administration. The company has eliminated fact-checkers in favor of Community Notes, lifted prohibitions on certain forms of hate speech, scrapped DEI initiatives, removed trans-inclusive features on its apps, and reinstated political content recommendations.
