The economics explain the pivot. Instagram head Adam Mosseri has acknowledged that the platform's small performance-based payout programme loses money, so creators on Instagram mostly earn from brand deals rather than direct payments. YouTube, by contrast, shares 55% of ad revenue with creators in its Partner Program and says it paid out more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over the four years to last year. Short-form clips are inherently harder to monetise because there is less room to place ads, which is why many creators treat their Instagram and TikTok accounts as promotional funnels for their YouTube channels.

Mosseri admitted he had long opposed long-form video on Instagram because short content like Reels drives more shares and direct messages, but said Instagram's VP of Product, Tessa Lyons, persuaded him to try again. The platform previously attempted long-form video with IGTV, which it scrapped. "Reels is still going to be a core part of Instagram," Lyons said, "but when you want to go deeper with the creators you love and the content that they're creating, you should be able to do that on Instagram."

Alongside Features, Instagram is testing "Clips as Reels", which lets creators cut Reels from their long videos and link viewers to the full version, and viewers can save long videos to watch on Instagram's TV app. The tests started in Brazil and are now expanding to a small trial in the US. Whether ads will appear in these long videos, and how creators would be paid, remains open: a Meta spokesperson said it is "too early to share a long-term monetization model" but that the company is exploring earnings from brands, fans and Instagram, including performance-based incentives.