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Facebook announced today updates to Subscriptions, a product launched in June 2020 where fans sign up to make regular monthly payments to their favorite creators. The updates let creators keep more of the money they make.
Top line
In an effort to woo more creators to its platform, Facebook has made a number of updates to the ways creators can make money. These include:
- Particiapting creators now have their own sign up link letting them promote their offer, keeping all the money from subscribers who sign up via these links, minus taxes.
- A bonus program that pays creators between $5 and $20 for every new subscriber they get from now until the end of 2021, as part of its $1 billion creator investment announced this summer. Creators can earn a bonus of up to $10,000 over the course of the program.
- Creators can download the email addresses of all their new subscribers, a real selling point for creators building audiences on third-party platforms.
- More features highlighting creators’ top supporters, like differentiated subscriber badges in livestreams.
The program is invite-only in all 27 markets where the Subscriptions feature is available to creators, but Facebook is planning to expand this bonus program and others.
Between the lines
Creators are hugely important to Facebook and its business, both for growing the amount of popular content on the platform, as Facebook continues to get pilloried for hosting harmful content and prizing profits above people.
Parent company Meta CMO previously told Adweek how important creators are in its efforts to bridge the metaverse with small to medium businesses, which make up a huge amount of Facebook’s ad business.
In the announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg swiped at Apple’s chunky 30% cut of the transaction fee, which has hampered creators’ ability to generate solid revenue. Facebook stated it won’t collect any fees from creators on Subscriptions purchases until 2023, at the earliest
Bottom line
Each platform has been building out similar products to help creators make money.
Indeed, interest in the creator economy and the platforms that support it is ballooning. Investment in creator economy startups is predicted to top $5 billion in 2021 alone, according to The Information, spurring the publisher to increase its coverage.
Yet there’s also evidence of popular creators, in the newsletter space especially, rebundling up to media brands. The Atlantic’s newsletter program launched this week includes Galaxy Brain writer Charlie Warzel. The New York Times has been experimenting with newsletters from top names like linguist John McWhorter and sociologist and essayist Tressie McMillan Cottom as a value-add for its subscription product, helping it reach 8.3 million paid subscriptions as of this morning.
