Instagram head Adam Mosseri said the platform’s performance-based payments to video creators lose money and that long-form video will need a monetization model that does not, in an interview on the “Colin and Samir Show.”

Mosseri described the company’s payment program as small and “ROI negative” for video. “We spend more money than we make back by a long shot,” he said, adding that scaling it up “doesn’t really make sense” because Instagram would be “burning capital.”

His explanation centered on incrementality. Payments only make sense if they produce additional content that drives additional consumption, and that consumption has to earn back the checks. Instagram has found that creators “don’t produce a lot more when we pay,” Mosseri said, adding that the extra content they do make is often not as high quality as what they were already posting for free. Without that lift, he said, paying creators mostly moves views from one video to another.

Mosseri does not view platform payments or performance-based bonuses as a revenue driver. “Breaking even is totally fine,” he said, but as someone responsible for the business, he cannot justify losing money on them.

Three Paths, One Currently Dominant

Mosseri said creators can be paid by the platform, by fans or by brands, and that on Instagram most are paid by brands today. Instagram is trying to support those deals through advertiser measurement tools and a creative marketplace that helps brands and creators find each other, he said. Subscriptions are also an option, though he’s unsure how much they matter.

For long-form, Mosseri said the options carry tradeoffs. Pre-roll and mid-roll ads would make attributed payouts easier, but he said viewers find them more annoying than ads between short videos, and Instagram has never run them. “I’ll get a lot of heat” from users, he said. Creators will “in principle” expect an ad revenue share, as on YouTube, but Mosseri is concerned the payouts would be nominal.

He said Instagram will continue to make bespoke deals “to bootstrap the ecosystem,” while focusing on scaled programs. If creators do not get sufficient value from posting long-form videos, “they won’t post,” Mosseri noted. “We’re late to the party,” he added, and the effort will fail if Instagram does not solve the problem.

Instagram announced a test of video uploads of up to 90 minutes and an expansion to Apple TV in the U.S. on October 26. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch it is “too early to share a long-term monetization model.” Instagram told Variety it is directly funding some creators making longer-form content during the test.

Ranking and AI

Mosseri also outlined how Instagram ranks content. He said the platform does not rank for engagement alone, and that originality, breakout potential and recency also factor in. Original creators receive more distribution than aggregators, he said, and a brand-new account can now get millions of views on a first post. Sends per reach remains the key metric for reaching people who do not follow an account, he said. Edits now calculates it, and Instagram is bringing the metric to its Insights tools.

On AI, he said Instagram does not rank AI-generated accounts differently but is starting to require AI-generated characters to label themselves. Automatic labeling carries the risk of false positives, he said, noting that one of his own carousels was classified as AI content. 

Mosseri called stolen stand-up material delivered by AI characters a top complaint in his direct messages and said originality is “the principled answer,” meaning copied bits could be treated as unoriginal content. He said Instagram’s ranking systems probably do not yet rank AI content as well as other content.

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