Instagram launches subscriptions to help creators monetise their content

• Creators and influencers on Instagram can now monetise their content by allowing their fans to ‘subscribe’ to them.
• Fans, in return, get loyalty badges, exclusive access to content and more.
• Instagram says it won’t charge a commission at least until 2023.

Facebook-owned Instagram has rolled out a new way to help creators monetise their content – subscriptions. The new feature allows Instagram users to subscribe for exclusive content from their favourite creators, like Instagram Live streams and badges, among other things.

Instagram is currently testing this feature with a small number of creators and influencers in the US. The company noted that subscriptions will be expanded to include more creators in the coming weeks.

For starters, fans will have to pay a monthly subscription fee to view exclusive content from their favourite creators. This will give them access to subscriber-only Lives and Stories, apart from a purple badge that will show their status as a subscriber to the content creator.

Instagram says that the price tiers will range from $0.99 to $99 per month – ultimately, creators will have the freedom to choose their prices. And to promote this feature, Instagram says that it won’t charge a commission to creators ‘at least until 2023’, so there’s still a year to go for the company as well as the creators to test out this new feature.

Instagram isn’t the first with paid subscriber-only plans

While Instagram’s subscription model could end up being the most useful for both creators as well as users, the Facebook-owned photo sharing service isn’t the first to offer subscriptions. Its rival Twitter has had the Super Follow feature for a while now, allowing users to pay between $2.99 to $9.99 a month to get exclusive content from their favourite creators.

Facebook, too, has had subscriptions for a while now.

But coming back to Instagram, subscriptions are one of the few options available to creators for monetisation. There are other options like Creator Shops, affiliate e-commerce, branded content marketplace, among other things.

On the other hand, YouTube has had subscriptions for a long time now, allowing its users to become “members” of their favourite channels, giving access to loyalty badges, custom emoji, exclusive access to behind-the-scenes photos and videos, live streams and more.

Outside of social media, websites like Patreon, Kickstarter, Ko-Fi are a few other options that allow content creators to monetise their audience.

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