Instagram confirm plans to help artists monetise livestreams

Instagram has responded to cries from creators to help them make a buck from their content with two new revenue-generating opportunities.

The platform, owned by Facebook, will soon offer advertising on its IGTV service and will trial a new product that its called Badges, for monetising Live videos.

“During the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve seen people supporting their favourite creators in Live with comments, likes and donations,” said Instagram in a blog post on Wednesday.

According to Instagram, Live saw a 70% increase in views from February to March, as creators continue to mobilise its Live product to connect with audiences during the COVID-19 crisis.

“To give fans another way to participate and show their love, we’re introducing badges that viewers can purchase during a live video,” said Instagram.

“With badges, creators can generate income from the content they’re already creating.”

The blog post said Badges will appear next to a person’s name throughout the live video, according to the social network, with supporting fan unlocking special features.

Badges will begin testing next month with a small group of creators and businesses, however, Australia was not named by Instagram when revealing the plans.

“Over the coming months, [Badges] will expand across the US, Brazil, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey, Spain, and Mexico,” according to the blog post.

With the livestream boom underway, the music industry has been hustling the big tech platforms to help monetise the hours of uploaded music content.

Local acts have also been forced to find creative ways to engage fans during the pandemic.

While organisations like Music Rights Australia are lobbying for licensing deals with big tech players, the major platforms are responding with solutions. Albeit, rather slowly.

The world’s biggest social network, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, said last month it has plans to release a new feature that would allow creators to charge for access to Facebook Live events.

From next week, Instagram will also introduce video ads on IGTV, which will appear when users click to watch long-form video from previews in their feed.

According to Instagram COO Justin Osofsky, speaking to The Verge, the platform will be sharing what he calls an “industry standard” 55% of ad revenue with creators.

“We’ll begin testing IGTV ads with a small group of creators and advertisers in the US, and will expand slowly over time as we improve the experience,” said Instagram.