Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Paid $2B To Content Creators In The Past Year — And It Wants To Pay Out More

Social media company Meta Platforms Inc. META has paid out over $2 billion to content creators this year as it works to boost monetization efforts for users of the platform.

Here's a look at what the company has done and what's next.

What Happened: Meta Platforms’ Facebook began monetization efforts in 2017 because it wanted to compete with other social media platforms and video outlets such as YouTube.

The company has paid out $2 billion over the last year with payouts for short-form videos and Reels up 80% year-over-year, as reported by TechCrunch.

Facebook said that more than four million content creators have earned money from the platform since 2017.

While the $2 billion figure is large and could be eye-catching to lure content creators to Facebook, the figure is a fraction of the $70 billion paid out by YouTube to content creators over the last three years as part of its partner program, TechCrunch reported.

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What's Next: To help grow its content creation, Meta announced several changes this week.

The company is rolling out Facebook Content Monetization, which combines three existing creator monetization efforts (in-stream ads, ads on Reels, Performance bonus) into one platform.

Creators on the new platform can earn from photos, text posts, short videos and longer videos, according to the company.

"We're proud of how our monetization programs have helped creators thrive on Facebook, but we know that the different availability, eligibility requirements and sign-up processes of our various programs have resulted in some creators missing opportunities and other not being eligible to earn from all available formats," the company said.

With the new platform, creators only have to join one platform with several ways to monetize their content.

The company sent out invitations to one million creators as part of the content monetization beta launch. Additional invitations will be sent in the "following months."

Open enrollment for the content monetization platform begins in 2025.

META Price Action: Meta stock closed Monday up 1.74% to $582.77 on Thursday versus a 52-week trading range of $279.40 to $583.36. Meta stock is up 68.3% year-to-date in 2024.

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