Meta is doing away with monthly Reels Play payouts

Meta is moving away from its Reels Play bonus program.

It first introduced the bonuses back in 2021 as part of its $1 billion commitment to help creators build sustainable businesses on its platforms through 2022. Through Reels Play, creators would earn monthly bonuses if the videos they uploaded to Instagram‘s TikTok competitor, Reels, hit viewership targets.

The program hadn’t had the smoothest ride. In April 2022, creators en masse began reporting their Reels Play payouts had suddenly been cut by up to 70%, while their viewership targets had been raised. A month later, Meta admitted it was “making some updates” and “adjusting how payouts are calculated.” It never publicly revealed what those updates were.

Now, Meta tells Tubefilter it’s “evolving” Reels Play bonuses—by no longer giving them.

“We will stop extending new and renewed Reels Play deals for creators on Facebook and for US creators on Instagram at this time,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.

Meta tells Tubefilter that it will honor current payout deals over the next 30 days, so creators who already have viewership targets and projected payouts for March will in fact be paid out if they hit their targets. But after this month, those payouts will stop.

Or, at least, the payouts as we know them. Meta says that it plans to “be more targeted in how we deploy Reels Play bonuses to make them better and iterate faster,” and its spokesperson additionally noted that Meta “will look into ways to run the program in a more targeted form, for example in potential new markets.”

To Tubefilter, Meta adds that Reels Play has always been a test program and that it believes “other monetization products are scaling more quickly and proving more sustainable over the long term.”

It specifically points to Ads on Reels, saying that all creators who were enrolled in Reels Play will be automatically onboarded to Ads on Reels on Facebook—so they’ll have a chance to earn revenue on their Reels through that program. Ads on Reels will also be coming to Instagram later this year, Meta says.

Meta declined to provide information about how much it’s paid creators through Reels Play to date.