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Alex Smetana knows a thing or two about viral marketing. He’s been in the game for the past five years, and has seen extraordinary success in that time. Today, his collection of Instagram pages has a combined total of 14 million followers. That has earned him quite a number of opportunities for making money. Today, he helps brands and influencers make money on Instagram themselves, given how well the platform works for providing those kinds of opportunities.
Getting paid for using Instagram isn’t that hard. If it was, you wouldn’t see as many people living off of it as there are. However, you need to understand a few things first. Given that he has been a digital marketer for some time, Alex explains how you can get paid for using this popular social network.
Most people know that YouTube pays people when they amass high view counts on their videos, through running ads on the videos. Instagram has something similar in the works and calls it the Instagram Partner Program. You get paid by CPM, which means for every thousand views. YouTube takes their cut, of course, and you’re left with around half of that. If there is a similar arrangement coming to Instagram, then this could open up even more opportunities for making money on the two-billion-strong social media platform.
While we don’t know when this feature will be rolled out, it’s likely to come out soon. This will be yet another way for Instagram to try and take more market share from YouTube with the help of Instagram TV. Within a 10-minute video on IGTV, it will be possible to easily place two or three, or maybe even four, ads into a video, leading to video content being monetized. If YouTube’s CPM rates are anything to go by, a video with a million views can eventually be earning the video creator tens of thousands of dollars! That’s not bad for making a video on your phone and sharing it with others.
Today, some videos on Instagram are already getting millions and even tens of millions of views. The CPM may not reach the high levels you can get right now for certain niches on YouTube, at least not right away. However, it’s realistic to assume it will be $0.02-$0.04 CPM out of the gate. Both Instagram and content creators have a lot to gain from the Instagram Partner Program once it gets rolled out.
This will probably be what finally gets people to post long-form content on IGTV, considering it’s been lagging in user adoption. After all, why create long-form content for Instagram if YouTube is going to pay you? People who would rather create video content on Instagram if they got paid for it will flock to the platform, leading to more opportunities for influencers and brands, while lining the pockets of both creators and Instagram. Alex is excited about this new development and looks forward to helping influencers and brands create viral video content on Instagram once it gets rolled out.
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