In order to reward producers for creating Reels and achieving certain goals, Meta is pausing its initiative. The initiative encouraged content creators to produce more brief video content when it was first launched in 2021. The Instagram initiative was only open to producers located in the U.S., so the shutdown will affect all Reels creators on Instagram and Facebook.

The program’s cancellation, which was first reported by Business Insider, suggests that platforms want to stop compensating artists based on how well-liked their brief videos are. According to the story, Meta will continue to honour any incentive commitments for a period of 30 days. If Reels join a new market, Meta said to the newspaper that it might reintroduce the programme in “targeted” methods. Given that the short video product is already accessible in more than 150 nations, it is a little odd to learn this.

Why is Meta doing so?

As previously revealed by TechCrunch, this programme offered generous incentives to authors. Many authors received bonuses of over $10,000, with some alleging to receive as much as $35,000 per month. But in order for their Reels to be successful, these producers needed millions of views, and Meta was glad to give money away to promote the format.

Given that short videos are currently one of the most popular content types on social media, Meta is presumably attempting to rake in advertising dollars. In addition to showing in-stream advertising, it also extended its overlay ads trial to artists in more than 50 nations last year. The business gives the authors of both of these ad formats a 55% cut of the profits.

Reels has a $1 billion yearly income rate, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s statement from last year. However, the business would like to see the format bring in more revenue while it spends money on the metaverse initiatives. At the investor conference for Meta’s Q4 2022 results, Zuckerberg stated that Reels is not generating enough money yet.

“The next bottleneck that we are focused on to continue growing Reels is improving monetization efficiency or the revenue that’s generated per minute of Reels watched. Currently, the monetization efficiency of Reels is much less than Feed. So the more that Reels grows, even though it adds engagement to the system overall, it takes some time away from Feed and we actually lose money,” he said.

As the company is stopping bonuses, creators would need incentives to post short videos on Meta’s platforms instead of TikTok or YouTube Shorts. Facebook has promised to give more monetization tools to creators to earn money on Reels.