The four products, in one list:
- Gifts: viewers buy Stars and send them on your reels. Meta pays you $0.01 per Star. From 500 followers, in 49 listed countries.
- Subscriptions: followers pay $0.99 to $99.99 a month for extra content. From 10,000 followers.
- Badges: bought by viewers during your live video.
- Bonuses: invitation only, in Japan, South Korea and the United States, and the reels bonus needs 5 million views in three months just to qualify.
What Instagram pays for in 2026, product by product
Meta's help centre was read on 4 September 2026. These are its current terms, not a forecast.
| Product | What puts money in your balance | Who qualifies | What Meta publishes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gifts on reels | A viewer buys Stars and sends a gift | Professional account, 18 or older, 500 followers, a listed country | $0.01 per Star to the creator. Meta and the app store take their share when the viewer buys the Stars |
| Subscriptions | A follower pays a monthly price you set | Professional account, 18 or older, 10,000 followers, a listed country | $0.99 to $99.99 a month. Meta says it currently waives its own fee |
| Badges | A viewer buys a badge during your live video | Eligible professional accounts | Paid with the other tools around the 21st of the following month |
| Bonuses | Qualified views on reels, carousels and single-image posts during a bonus period | Invitation only. Japan, South Korea, the US. 5 million reel views in the previous three months | Earnings "based on the number of qualified views", adjusted for audience demographics and engagement. No rate |
Three lines from Meta's own pages matter more than any calculator on the internet:
- On bonuses: "Instagram may offer specific bonus programs to creators by invitation only for a limited time with availability in different countries. Please note there is an element of random selection."
- On the rate: Meta defines Average RPM as "the average rewards you've earned for every 1,000 qualified views" and says it depends on "where people watch your content, how much they interact with it, how long they watch it and how much advertisers are willing to pay for ads on it".
- On brand deals: "At this time, branded content is not eligible for monetization from Instagram." A paid partnership post earns nothing from a bonus.
What 1,000 views actually paid, 2021 to 2026
Instagram has paid for views before, by invitation, and the record shows what it paid.
- 14 July 2021. Meta commits more than $1 billion to creator programmes by the end of 2022. The Reels Summer bonus pays invited US creators "based on how their reels perform". Meta Newsroom
- 11 November 2021. TechCrunch documents the offers. A creator with about 24,000 followers is offered up to $800 for 1.7 million views, then up to $8,500 for 9.28 million. A Reddit user reports up to $35,000 for more than 58 million views. By our arithmetic, 47 to 92 cents per 1,000 views. TechCrunch
- 22 February 2022. Meta's newsroom: the Reels Play bonus "pays eligible creators up to $35,000 a month based on the views of their qualifying reels". Meta Newsroom
- 6 April 2022. Tubefilter reports payouts cut by as much as 70%. One creator's threshold for the same $35,000 rises from 58 million to 359 million views a month, so 60 cents per 1,000 becomes 10 cents. Tubefilter
- 9 March 2023. Meta pauses the US Reels Play bonus on Instagram and Facebook, honours existing deals for 30 days, and says it will build an ad revenue share for Reels instead. Social Media Today
- 5 April 2024. A spring bonus, invitation only in the US, Japan and South Korea, caps at $30,000 per creator over 30 days. Creators report RPMs of 14 to 16 cents. Adam Mosseri says Instagram "couldn't afford to run" the old programme in the US. Tubefilter
- 22 August 2024. A creator with more than 50,000 followers publishes her bonus screenshots: $0.40 for a 22,000-view reel, $3.47 for 200,000 views, $110.15 for 4,000,000 views. By our arithmetic, 2 to 3 cents per 1,000 views. Medium
- 21 January 2025. The Breakthrough Bonus offers up to $5,000 over 90 days to creators who move over from other platforms and post at least ten Instagram reels per 30 days. Meta says it paid creators more than $2 billion in the past year across its apps. Social Media Today
- 6 October 2025. TechCrunch: "Meta has been scaling back its creator payout programs over the past few years. Earlier this year, Meta shut down a program that paid creators for ads placed in their profiles." The new Ring award for top creators carries no money. TechCrunch
The direction is one way. Every published figure since 2021 is lower than the one before it, and the 2026 terms need 5 million views before an invitation is even possible.
Three reels with 1,000 views each
Same views, three different balances.
- No invitation, no gifts. $0. This is the ordinary reel, and the one most readers of this page have. The views count for reach, not for money.
- An invited bonus creator. At the 14 to 16 cents that spring-bonus creators reported in 2024, 1,000 qualified views add 14 to 16 cents. At the rate behind the August 2024 screenshots, 2 to 3 cents. Logged-out views, repeat views and views from your own profile do not count as qualified.
- A reel that earns one gift. A viewer sends a 100-Star gift: $1.00 to you. The viewer paid about $2 for those Stars at the pack prices TechCrunch listed, and Meta and the app store keep the rest.
Add a fourth, which is not a reel at all. A follower who subscribes at $4.99 pays that every month, and Meta says it currently waives its own fee on subscriptions. Ten subscribers are $49.90 a month, every month. The 200,000-view reel in the 2024 screenshots paid $3.47, once.
What sponsors pay for the same 1,000 views
Meta is not the market for views. Brands are. Our pricing model estimates one sponsored post per follower tier, and the accounts we pull for market studies carry an average reel-view figure, so the two divide into a price per 1,000 reel views.
- 10K to 50K followers: median 19,758 reel views, $114 to $679 per post, so $5.80 to $34 per 1,000 views
- 50K to 100K: median 104,976 views, $899 to $1.5K per post, so $8.60 to $14
- 100K to 500K: median 186,985 views, $2.6K to $5.7K, so $14 to $31
- 500K to 1M: median 397,773 views, $5.9K to $12.2K, so $15 to $31
- 1M and above: median 1.8 million views, $12.2K and more, so from $6.70
The method, so you can argue with it: 8,400 accounts above 10,000 followers, deduplicated from the rows we pulled for our Spanish, Swiss, German and US studies between 30 July and 3 September 2026, and the Creator Pricing Report bands, full-year 2025 snapshot. A sample from our own pulls, not the whole database, and a median, not a guarantee. A reel that does three times the median earns a third of the figure per view; a reel that flops earns three times it.
Set against Instagram's documented bonuses, 3 to 60 cents per 1,000, a brand pays between ten and a thousand times more for the same thousand views. That gap is the whole answer to this page's question.
The YouTube side has the same shape. An agency that priced more than 4,000 sponsored deliverables from 2021 to July 2026, mostly US finance and business mid-rolls, found about 90% of them between $50 and $200 per 1,000 views with the median near $100, and puts the general YouTube sponsorship range at $15 to $30 per 1,000. Creators Agency, 21 March 2026
Where the readers of this page live, and what each country gets
Search Console says who reads this page: India first, then the United States, the United Kingdom, Pakistan and Canada. Meta's availability lists, read 4 September 2026, say what each gets.
- India: Gifts and Subscriptions are both on Meta's lists. The bonus programme is not; its invitation line names Japan, South Korea and the United States only. The Reels Play bonus that once reached India ended in March 2023.
- United States: all four products. Bonuses by invitation, with the 5 million reel views in three months.
- United Kingdom and Canada: Gifts and Subscriptions. The bonus page's invitation line does not name them, though its view thresholds for the photo bonus list the UK and Canada at 500,000 views a month, so tests may exist.
- Pakistan: neither Gifts nor Subscriptions appear on either list as of 4 September 2026.
Payout terms also change by country. In the US, Meta pays once you reach $5. Outside the US it is $25, or $100 by wire transfer. Bonuses pay around the 7th and 21st of the month; everything else pays around the 21st of the following month. Without a payout account you can hold up to $500 per tool, and after six months Meta says you forfeit it.
