Instagram has announced that it is testing a new feature called “Subscriptions”, which allows some content creators (or creators, as they are called by Instagram) to offer their followers exclusive stories and direct within a paid monthly subscription. Paid Stories and Stories are marked with a purple frame, and creators can recognize subscribers among their followers with a purple symbol next to their name. For the moment, Subscriptions is only active in the United States and only for ten creators involved in the test phase, but Instagram has said that it plans to extend it to others in the coming months – it is not clear if in other countries as well.
The subscription price can be chosen independently by each creator from eight amounts ranging from one to one hundred dollars per month. According to reports from Tech Crunch, at least until 2023 Instagram will not withhold any percentage on these transactions. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said in the video that creators do what they do for work and that it is therefore important that their earnings are predictable and not dictated by the results of the various contents that are published, which are inevitably unstable. As some tech sites have pointed out, Instagram’s main goal right now is to keep creators from moving to competing platforms like TikTok and incentivize them to produce more content.
