Facebook has announced plans to pay influencers $1 billion to use its products. The programme will run until the end of 2022 in an effort to revive the platform, which is now mostly known for misleading political conspiracies, photos of your mum’s garden, and seeing that everyone from high school is getting married before you.
According to billionaire and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the programme will allocate bits of the money to all kinds of influencers – incentivising the use of specific Facebook and Instagram features and setting milestones for creators to reach.
For now, the invitation-only programme seems to focus on users regularly live-streaming in exchange for payment, although any posts, videos, images, etc. are encouraged to draw influencers and users back to the app.
Further, the FB creator said he wants to “build the best platform for millions of creators to make a living”. However, as Gen Z-centred apps like TikTok continue to grow in popularity, OG platforms like Facebook seem to fall behind in their cultural relevance.
“Covid was an inflection point,” noted Facebook’s top product executive, Chris Cox, “where the industry and creators more generally started becoming more of a creative economy.”
Last year, Facebook offered high-price contracts to TikTok creators, asking them to shift their content to Instagram’s ‘reels’ platform instead, which offers similar short-form video content. Following Facebook’s initiative, TikTok announced the $200 million TikTok Creator Fund, which allows creators to “realise additional earnings that help reward the care and dedication they put into creatively connecting with an audience that's inspired by their ideas,” said general manager of TikTok US Vanessa Pappas in a statement.
Can Mark Zuckerberg successfully bribe people back onto the dead platform? We hope not! In the meantime, we’ll be scrolling our FYP.
