Several Instagram creators say Reels payments have fallen in recent weeks by up to 70% and the view threshold for getting paid is over 10 times higher
Cristina Criddle / Financial Times : Tweets: @coralreefer420 , @rachelszero , and @benedictevans Tweets: Coral Kamstra-Brown / @coralreefer420 : I've been getting reels $ for 3 months now & it would have ABSOLUTELY transformed my life if I had been paid for views at the start of my career. Realizing now how much peers have made on views alone, it's made me so proud of myself for sustaining without for SO LONG. @rachelszero : Instagram offered me that Reels bonus on my personal account (and not my anime one????) and I posted one throwaway outfit vid and got $87?! 87?! Bitch I'm about to start shitposting everything Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : I know product is hard, but why does Instagram Discover show posts you already marked ‘not interested’ from accounts you have blocked?
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram built Reels payouts as a competitive weapon against TikTok: it began testing $10,000+ bonuses for select Reels creators in late 2021, on top of earlier offers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to poach top TikTok talent outright. Internal Meta documents later quantified why the spending felt urgent — users spent 17.6M hours a day on Reels versus TikTok's 197.8M.
This report marks the turn from buying creator loyalty to rationing it: creators including @rachelszero and @coralreefer420 say payments have dropped by up to 70% in weeks while the view threshold for getting paid rose more than tenfold. The subsidy era that recruited them is being tightened from underneath.
First-order effects
- Creators who structured their income around Reels bonuses — some earning four figures from a single throwaway video at launch — take an immediate pay cut of up to 70% and now need over 10 times the views to qualify at all.
Second-order effects
- The cuts undercut the very poaching strategy they funded: Meta is still offering large-TikTok-following creators monthly bonuses to post on Reels first, but shrinking payouts for existing creators make those offers harder to trust, weakening Instagram's pitch against TikTok.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform-funded creator income proves cyclical rather than permanent — consistent with Meta later pausing the Reels Play bonus program in the US entirely — pushing creators toward distributing across multiple platforms instead of betting on any single payout scheme.
The trend: Creator incentive programs launched to fight TikTok are entering a retrenchment phase, with Instagram scaling payouts back faster than the creator base it recruited can adapt.