This is the sad reality that many content creators are finally waking up to. If you are an influencer on Instagram, then you are an unpaid employee of Facebook.
Got a million followers? Or even 1000? You take your time and get that photo just perfect, write your mini motivational speech, add in catchy hashtags and boom, you are live. Sit back and enjoy those likes, get a small endorphin rush, reply to a few of your super fast commenters and friends. Now let's sit back and watch that money rolling in…
Wait.
That’s right, you don’t earn any money from the content you share on Instagram, it’s at the Facebook HQ. And they ARE making that money. They are just watching your awesome engagement and seeing the advertising dollars rack up. To the tune of about 20 billion dollars a year.
Instagram is owned by Facebook and they own 100% of your fans' personal information like gender, age and location, and make 100% of their profits by advertising to your fans and share ZERO of that revenue with you. You are creating awesome free content on Instagram and they are using your content to sell advertising to YOUR followers and make 100% of the profit. They make billions and pay you nothing.
Yes, you can do a sponsored post here and there and surely companies will send you free stuff, but is that fair compensation for the loads of impressions you're generating on your account? The big social media companies know every detail about your followers and fans, name, age, location, marital status, household income, hobbies, interests, everything. They use that info to show them advertising and keep all of the money... you get paid zero.
Oh, and don’t forget, at any point, they can permanently BAN your account for any reason without explanation and you lose all of your followers. Everything you've built up will be lost.
At least YouTube pays out 30% revenue to those lucky ones that get into the monetize zone (and even there your content can just as easily get demonetized), and some play it smart enough to make a living from sponsorships on YouTube. But 99% won’t. Ever. Millions of awesome content creators will never get paid a cent for their amazing photos, awesome videos, sick music, great art, indy films and so on.
2021 is the dawn of the content creators taking back what is rightfully theirs, their own fan data and they can choose what to do with it and if or how they make money off their own audiences.
Engage with your audience. Own your own website. Own your own fan data. Monetize if you choose to. They are YOUR followers. They are YOUR fans. Try out Fangage for free to take back control of your fanbase and earn a fair income from your efforts.
