With the purpose of offering monetary incentives to social media influencers on the platform, Instagram as it got recently owned by Meta is presently testing a feature which is being called ‘Gifts’ which will be helping out creators earn money through the popular video format called Reels. It appears that the app users will be able to send Gifts to each other by clicking a button that will be placed at the bottom of the Reels.
According to sources, the feature is being currently tested within the internal management of the team as a prototype. However, the recent reports of the feature had been increasing over the past few months as the infamous tech researcher Alessandro Paluzzi during July dropped major news about Instagram constantly testing out a new feature under the tag ‘content’ appreciation’.
If Instagram does prefer the option of adding more money-making avenues with the app features, it shouldn’t be considered the first time that a social media giant by Meta has tried to emulate the same.
In fact, two years ago in 2020, Instagram rolled out its Badges feature which helps users to show support to their favourite creators while an ongoing live video. The badges come in different price tiers ranging from $0.99 to $1.99 to $4.99.
Moreover, similar to Instagram’s ‘Gift’ feature, Twitter already has rolled out a Tip jar feature that was in big news last year during the month of May. In December 2021, the video-only platform TikTok allowed users who have been using the app on the platform to directly pay tips to their favourite content creators.
Meta was trying to set up a new group that will be focusing on creating products for Facebook and Instagram that will be based mostly on paid features. It was later said that the new group will be called ‘New Monetization Experiences’ and will be formed by Meta’s former head of research Pratiti Raychoudhury. Snap Inc and Twitter Inc which are Meta’s competitors have already rolled out paid tiers to showcase more additional features.
However, John Hegeman, Meta’s head of ads and business products recently said that the company is committed to growing the ads business and have made no further plans to let users pay to turn off ads.
