What You Need To Know About IGTV Monetization & How It’ll Impact Your Marketing Strategy

Businesses are seeing Instagram marketing as a key tool for their online success, and it might soon become even more valuable. IGTV monetization is the platform’s newest strategy to compete with booming video sites like YouTube. Not only will businesses presumably be able to choose to advertise alongside IGTV videos, but those businesses who are creating this video content can also use it as a stream of income.

What is IGTV Monetization?

In short, IGTV monetization allows content creators on Instagram to make money by playing short ads along with their IGTV content. Users will have to agree to follow the Partner Program Monetization Policies in order to take advantage of this opportunity.

Nearly every platform uses some form of advertising to generate revenue for content creators at this point. Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram…they all have ads that run in feeds, on sidebars and even during videos. We’ve generally become accustomed to seeing ads when consuming content, although some platforms like YouTube and streaming services like Hulu allow you to pay for an ad-free experience.

Facebook and YouTube are already using ads to create monetization opportunities for their video creators. Developing these monetization tools for IGTV will bring more influencers (and likely their followers with them) to the app. While Instagram has over 1 billion active accounts, Facebook has more than double that, as does YouTube.

Attracting influencers who are currently making a name for themselves on other platforms is important for Instagram. As newer apps like TikTok are quickly becoming popular, Instagram is doing what they can to ensure that those with big followings join and stay on their platform.

If you’re still wondering what is IGTV, it’s Instagram’s vertical long-form video option. IGTV videos can be up to an hour long and they stay on the platform as long as you want them to be there. You can direct people to them from a post in your feed or a Story, and users can access them within the Instagram app, or they can download the separate IGTV app if they’d prefer.

When will It Become Available?

Instagram began testing these tools in the past couple of months. The most recent update is that IGTV monetization has been rolled out to certain selected creators to participate in an initial testing of in-stream ads on their IGTV videos.

Depending on how well these tests go, other creators could look to see this option in the coming months. As with any social media update, though, there’s lots of testing to be done before it becomes a truly widespread offering for Instagram business accounts.

How Can You Become Eligible?

Well, as with many questions relating to this topic, there aren’t any definite answers yet. What we do know is that anyone who wants to include ads on their IGTV videos will need to abide by Partner Monetization Policies. Presumably these would be similar to Facebook’s policies. Among many other requirements, these policies mean that users have to follow community standards, share authentic content, monetize authentic engagement, and follow their payment and page terms.

On Facebook, there are a few pieces of criteria content creators need to meet.

• They need to have more than 10,000 followers.
• They need to make videos that are more than three minutes long AND that have over 30,000 one-minute views over the previous two months.
• They must meet Facebook’s monetization eligibility standards.

Now, we don’t know if Instagram will have similar requirements, but since they’re owned by Facebook there’s a good chance that creators will have some set of qualifications to meet. Will it be like the 10,000 followers needed for the “swipe up” feature, or a verified account requirement, or will it be something else? At this point we’ll have to wait and see.

How Does this Compare to Video Monetization on Other Sites?

According to a report from Bloomberg, video creators will likely receive 55% of ad revenue on IGTV, which is the same rate as YouTube. Currently, YouTube is bringing in about $15 million in advertising revenue, while Instagram’s traditional feed ads generate approximately $20 billion in revenue for the platform.

That $20 billion makes up over 25% of parent company Facebook’s sales. Speaking of Facebook, they currently offer video creators 55% of ad revenue generated on their videos published to Facebook Watch. However, not all creators have found the process to be smooth, as the platform sometimes takes up to a day or two to approve the video to host ads. At that point many of the video’s views have already happened, which decreases the profitability of the video.

How IGTV Can Impact Your Instagram Marketing Strategy

Instagram is already an incredibly popular platform for businesses and influencers. In fact, 90% of users follow an Instagram business account. And, over 200 million users visit at least one business profile each day. If Instagram is not already part of your marketing strategy, it certainly should be.

Once you start using Instagram for business, you can take advantage of many different purposes, from increasing visibility to driving sales to connecting with your customers. IGTV is one of the newer options on the platform for longer-form video content.

Reach New People

Instagram is a great place for businesses to expand their reach and generate revenue from your content. With the addition of monetization to IGTV, more content creators will likely be drawn to the platform. The sooner you can bring your business and content to the platform, the better.

Using IGTV and Instagram can also allow companies to reach a different demographic and audience than Facebook and YouTube. Females are more likely to use Instagram and Facebook, but males are more likely to watch videos on YouTube. 

It’s important to note that young to middle-aged people are likely to be on many different social media platforms and often make up the majority of users. However, each platform attracts different amounts of people from each age range. Younger people are more likely to be on Instagram, while middle-aged people are more likely to log onto Facebook. Late-middle-aged to older people are more likely to be on YouTube.

Provide New Content

IGTV videos are often higher-quality content than traditional feed posts and even stories. Videos in the feed can’t be longer than one minute, and stories are filmed in 15-second segments. Instagram Live is great for longer-form content, but it disappears after 24 hours.

By investing resources into creating quality IGTV videos, you can give your audience a dynamic, interesting way to see and learn from you that can last longer and create an ROI for your company. With the upcoming monetization options, you can begin to see that ROI come into your business in a different, more immediate way.

Being able to collect revenue from ads playing on your IGTV videos can give you a hands-off, passive income source that is sustainable, especially if your videos are evergreen. If people can get value from your videos at any time, IGTV monetization can be a way to add a new revenue stream to your business.

When creating content for IGTV, it’s a good idea to test it out in other forms on the platform before you invest the resources into creating the top-quality video content users are accustomed to seeing on IGTV. Test out different topics in your feed posts. Then use those topics to inform what you talk about on Stories. Then choose the Story that got the most engagement and use that to create and Instagram Live. Once your audience shows you what they like to see from you, turn that into your evergreen IGTV videos that you can link back to and send people toward for months to come.

Conclusion

This new monetization option will likely make you re-think your Instagram marketing strategy. It’s no secret that IGTV production can take a significant amount of time. If you’re ready to focus on high-quality, longer-form video content as part of your strategy, that’s great. That might mean that now is a good time to look into Instagram tools that can help you automate more of your processes and smaller tasks so you can devote your attention to creating top-quality content.

IGTV monetization is still a very new concept. It’s still in the testing phase, and a lot could certainly change between now and when it is rolled out more fully to content creators. What this indicates is that IGTV itself is becoming more and more popular. When it was first released, it didn’t make quite as big of a splash as Instagram had hoped. Now that they’re investing in creating an advertising component of it, more creators and users are likely to begin posting and watching these videos.

While there are certainly many more questions that need answering, IGTV monetization is coming, and it’s going to change your Instagram marketing strategy. Maybe you’re excited to add advertisements to your existing or future IGTV videos. Or, maybe you’re looking at this from the other side and are ready to see the options to pay for advertising on other people’s videos. Either way, this update is going to make a major change for Instagram and IGTV.