Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, told the world today it would focus its algorithms on original content. Now it's going to pay for it.

Meta announced this week it will now pay more bonuses to Reels creators, who were publishing the original content on Facebook, as part of another measure to repel the threat of TikTok. The firm warned that this change in payouts would mean the loss of money for some creators, while others may get more compared with their previous performance. It is also introducing a new incentive called "Challenges" that allow Facebook Reels creators to earn up to $4,000 per month based on the attainment of specific goals.

Not to be confused with hashtag challenges, wherein a company asks its creator community to post about a certain topic, Facebook's Challenges are a way through a series of bonuses which must be completed in sequence to reach a maximum payout.

Each month, creators will be able to participate in a set of sequential, cumulative challenges building on one another. In that case, the developer would get their initial $20, after five of their reels hitting 100 views. On unlocking the challenge, another one would unlock, making $100 after 20 reels hit 500 views each. This process would keep happening till the 30th day and restart on the very first day of a different month to begin a new set of challenges.

According to the platform, only Reels Bonus program creators have been invited up until this point. Still, the company maintains that it is planning to test a range of incentive programs and change payment pricing as it learns. It also claims to have started its rollout of overlay ads in Reels on Facebook where it's testing with a wider set of creators; more will roll in over time.

The social network today begins rolling them out worldwide, as well as other new creative products and features for ads Facebook Reels launches globally with other new creative products and ad features "More than 45% of Instagram accounts like, comment on, or share Reels at least once a week," said Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, speaking to an audience of media buyers during the company's NewFronts presentation earlier this week. Creators of all stripes are leaning into Reels and using it as a way to reach new audiences and connect with their existing fans. And we're supporting them with tools to monetize, both through ad revenue share bonus programs and support from fans," she said.

This is in addition to virtual tipping system, Stars, which the company said has expanded tests on Facebook and soon, Instagram creators will be able to crosspost their Reels to Facebook, something that it has been testing since last fall. As part of this expansion, Meta will test enabling creators to earn an ad revenue share on their crossposted Reels via Overlay ads, among other features.

Today, Overlay ads are being monetized on Meta to the creator's benefit of 55%, while Facebook gets 45%. This is a bit higher than the 50/50 share TikTok simply announced this week with the unveiling of its new TikTok Pulse program. Though very different from Pulse, which is the first and only ad rev share offered to TikTok creators for now,. But because Facebook ads still tend to be more expensive than TikTok's, it's hard to say yet which rev share would be more beneficial to a creator's bottom line.

Perhaps the bigger news coming out this week is that Facebook is taking a step to make earning bonuses less of a black box.

Creators have said that last year they were getting much higher rewards—up to $10,000 or more—but the figures have recently dwindled. According to the FT, creators reported that in order to achieve a given bonus target, it now took more views than before, making it harder to gain bonuses. Yet because Meta's scheme is dynamic and differential, it is also difficult to really understand what, in real terms, Meta's targets are.

Instagram pays big bonuses for posts on Reels, its TikTok imitation

Instagram's Reels is Facebook's TikTok cloner. On that front, Meta will now at least introduce a way for individual creators to track their bonuses in one place to see how well they're doing.

Meta says it's introducing a Reels Play Bonus Insight page on Facebook, where they'll be able to see how many plays each of their eligible Reels received within a given earning period.

The new changes to the Bonus program follow another move recently made by the company, changing its algorithms to push priority to content that is original rather than reposts or other aggregated content from other sources. Meta had said beforehand that it didn't want TikTok reposts; having said earlier that content with a watermark from another site would be downranked.

Instagram looking to update its ranking system to improve the highlighting of original content

As Meta pushes to monetize more of its Reels with ads, the company used NewFronts this week to trumpet its progress in challenging TikTok. Here, the company repeated some metrics related to a video's traction, noting that 50% of the time spent on Meta's platforms now involves video; over 2 billion people watch videos with in-stream ads; and more than 700 million people are using AR effects each month.

This video format is our latest video format, and Reels is now the biggest engagement growth driver on Instagram, said Nada Stirratt, Meta VP of Americas, speaking to the company's NewFronts presentation. " Our suite of video solutions is used by both creators and publishers to tell immersive stories to audiences at scale," she said.