Meta is receiving fresh criticism from creators of short-form videos. It’s actually due to recent payment notifications related to its Music Revenue Sharing initiative. This program allows video creators to earn a portion of ad revenue from their Facebook Reels featuring licensed music. However, the notifications mistakenly displayed significant pending payouts. And this leads to backlash. Well, Meta has now rectified the error.

Meta’s Revenue Share Payments Error

According to Fortune’s report, a number of Facebook creators were initially informed of potential payouts amounting to tens of thousands of dollars due to a glitch in Meta’s system. Subsequently, Meta has issued notifications to address the error and lowered the payout amounts.

Meta introduced the Music Revenue Share program last July, which was later extended to include Reels. This expansion caused uncertainty among creators about potential earnings from Reels clips, as there was no prior benchmark for comparison. Although the error in initial payment notifications affected only a few creators, Meta has informed them all of the issue’s resolution.

Social media platforms are trying to give good rewards to popular creators. But they are still figuring out how to pay them in a fair way, especially for short videos. Short videos are usually just 30 seconds long. This makes it hard to put ads at the beginning or middle of the video. It’s easy to know how many people saw an ad in longer videos and credit it to the creator. But with short videos, it’s not that simple. So, they are working on finding better ways to make sure creators earn money fairly and reliably.

No social media platform has figured out the perfect way to pay creators yet. Snapchat has faced criticism from creators because its payment system for Spotlight videos has been unreliable. YouTube’s new program to make money from Shorts hasn’t been great for many creators. TikTok also doesn’t share revenue fairly, and like Snapchat, it’s hard for creators to make a steady income.

Meta’s payment issue is not exactly the same, but it shows that apps are struggling to find the best way to pay for short videos. This is a problem because short videos are really popular on all these apps, and they all want to have the best short videos. But none of the platforms are clearly the best for making money from short videos. Meta’s mistake might make things worse for them. Creators might not trust them as much now. Meta will need to do a lot to regain that trust.