Instagram’s next way to get eyes on Reels: creator tips

As you may know, Instagram really wants Reels to happen. It also really, really wants creators to know how important they are, as head Adam Mosseri frequently reiterates in platform update videos.

To both those ends, it’s now testing a creator tipping feature that seems to be exclusive to Reels.

The feature was first spotted by developer Alessandro Paluzzi in late August, and per his tweets was originally called “Content Appreciation.” In screenshots he shared, it had been renamed to “Gifts.”

There’s next to no information about what Gifts would entail, but per Business Insider, it would let users send tips to one another within the Reels section of Instagram.

A spokesperson for Meta, Instagram’s parent company, told Business Insider that Gifts are currently an internal prototype and aren’t being tested in the general user population.

Generally when a feature is being tested with users, it’s still in a tenuous state that might see it never being rolled out widely, or being rolled out in a radically different form. The fact that the feature isn’t yet in testing with live users means it’s in an even more tenuous position.

But considering TikTok is Reels’ biggest threat, and TikTok has a tipping feature, and Instagram has a penchant for pinching features popular on other platforms…It’s not far-fetched to think Gifts will probably become a part of Reels sometime in the future.

Speaking of TikTok, it’s also worth noting here that according to reported internal Instagram documents leaked this morning by The Wall Street Journal, around a third of Reels videos were originally created on another platform—and that other platform is most often TikTok.

The documents also showed that Instagram users spend 17.6 million hours per day watching Reels, while TikTok’s users spend 197 million hours per day watching content, as social media consultant Matt Navarra laid out.

More worryingly for Reels, the documents—which, again, allegedly came straight from Instagram—asserted “most Reels users have no engagement whatsoever.”