Instagram is chasing YouTube's audience with 90-minute videos and Apple TV integration — but refuses to share ad revenue with the creators who would build the platform's content library, leaving the people doing the actual work to fend for themselves while Meta pockets the upside.
The move is the latest example of Big Tech's digital sharecropping model: get users to produce the content, sell ads against it, and return nothing. YouTube pays qualified creators 55 percent of ad revenue. Instagram is offering no equivalent — just vague promises of "performance-based incentives" and help finding brand deals.
Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced the test — called Features — in a video on the platform Monday. "I have been against doing long-form video on the platform for a long time," Mosseri said, alongside VP of product Tessa Lyons. His concern, he claimed, was keeping Instagram about "connecting with friends." Now he says Instagram needs to "lean into" long-form.
The test allows select U.S. creators to post horizontal videos up to 90 minutes, with short-form Reels serving as discovery clips that link to the full video. Instagram Lives will also surface beyond a creator's followers in the Reels tab. The viewing experience is designed for television: Instagram's TV app, already on Samsung, Fire TV, and Google TV, is expanding to Apple TV in the U.S.
Lyons said Instagram is working on "a few different deals" with early creators but confirmed no exclusivity requirements. Creators with existing ad relationships can bring them along; Instagram says it will help those without find deals. Early test participants include podcast host and Skims co-founder Emma Grede, beauty creator Monet McMichael, and football content creator Donald De La Haye.
Both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter covered the launch, but the framing split is telling. Variety led with the revenue-sharing gap in its headline — the core economic question for anyone trying to make a living. The Hollywood Reporter buried it, framing the story as Instagram capturing "a bigger part of the entertainment landscape" and waiting until deep in the piece to note that YouTube's 55 percent revenue share is the benchmark Instagram is declining to match.
An Instagram spokesperson told Variety it's "too early to share a long-term monetization model" but said the company is "exploring ways for creators to earn from brands, fans and Instagram." That language — brands, fans, and Instagram in that order — tells you where ad revenue sits in Meta's priority list.
Instagram has already tested Features in Brazil and plans to expand to tens of thousands of U.S. creators. The company is also experimenting with Series, a home for episodic Reels, and has been courting microdrama studios in Southeast Asia.
The question isn't whether Instagram can build a YouTube competitor. It's whether creators will keep producing content for a platform that treats their labor as a free input — and whether the tech press will ever call the arrangement what it is.
