Instagram's Adam Mosseri says Facebook plans to help creators avoid Apple's 30% cut by “facilitating transactions that happen in other places”
- Facebook is setting its sight on the creator economy, hoping to allow millions of people to make a living off its family of apps.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is one beat in Facebook's year-long campaign to make its family of apps a living for millions of creators. Zuckerberg had already teased a brand-creator marketplace and other Instagram money tools in April (teased upcoming creator monetization features), and a day before Mosseri's comment, Facebook said it would show creators exactly how much Apple, Google, and others skim from their payouts — transparency about platform cuts that primes the anti-take-rate argument.
The workaround has precedent inside Apple's own rules: since late 2020, Apple has allowed Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to sell ads via direct transactions in their iOS apps without going through in-app purchase — so 'facilitating transactions that happen in other places' extends an existing loophole from ads to creator commerce.
First-order effects
- Creators earning through Instagram and Facebook keep more of each transaction when it settles outside iOS, directly reducing the 30% Apple takes on digital goods sold in-app.
- Facebook converts its creator-economy push — including Zuckerberg's later $1B commitment to creators through 2022 — into a pricing weapon against Apple rather than just a feature set.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces revenue leakage on a high-volume category as Meta routes subscriptions and creator payments around IAP; the later custom subscription links using Meta's native payments system show the bypass becoming productized, not experimental.
- Other platforms with creator businesses must decide whether to match off-app payment facilitation or keep paying the store tax while competitors advertise lower effective fees to the same creators.
Third-order effects
- If major platforms normalize steering transactions outside the app store, the 30% take rate stops being a default and becomes a negotiable fee applied mainly to developers without Meta-scale leverage — a structural shift toward what amounts to a regulated platform take rate.
- App stores' control over digital-goods payments weakens, pushing Apple toward monetizing distribution by other means — advertising surfaces like expanded search-result placements — to replace tolls lost at checkout.
The trend: Platform economics are moving from mandatory app-store taxation of digital goods toward off-store payment rails, with large platforms like Meta using creator payouts as the wedge.