After neglecting his Facebook page for years, dismissing it as a relic for older people, creator Anwar Jibawi started to notice a surprising change — the checks he received from the social media site were getting bigger and bigger.
That was enough to make Jibawi pay more attention. Shortly thereafter, he hired a new team member to keep up with his tempo of posting comedy sketch videos 10 times a day. Facebook has since become one of his biggest income sources. “It’s not unusual for it to hit six figures a month,” says Jibawi, who has 20 million followers on the platform.
The shift, noticed by many other creators, was the effect of a change in the social media site’s monetization policy last fall: Facebook now pays creators based on the performance of their posts rather than through a share of ad revenue. The move has creators now treating the platform as a top income source.
The goal of the new program is to incentivize creators to make more original and compelling content and keep users coming amid competition from younger-skewing platforms and concerns about a stalling albeit still very large user base.
“What we’re trying to do is make that a little less well-kept secret and get the word out. Because we do believe the opportunity here for creators is very, very large,” says Yair Livne, senior director of Facebook Creator Product.
More than 60 percent of users’ time on Facebook is spent watching videos on the newsfeed, Reels and Stories, with the majority coming from creators, but the site also pays for photo and text posts, which Jibawi calls “a game-changer.”
Facebook currently has millions of creators in the program, which is invite-only. Payment is based on views and engagement with the posts as well as the quality of the content, prioritizing originality and disincentivizing clickbait. The best performing videos tend to fall into the how-to category, like cooking videos or parenting tips.
Maggie McGaugh, who has 1.9 million followers for her DIY content and scam reveals, says she reliably makes $20,000 to $30,000 a month on Facebook. “Unless I get a huge brand deal, it’s my biggest source of income,” McGaugh says.
YouTube used to be Jibawi’s biggest source of income, but he found his share of ad revenue decreased as more content flooded the platform with the site’s introduction of short videos. TikTok and Instagram also have funds from which they pay creators, based on similar metrics to Facebook, but Jibawi estimates he gets $5 from TikTok for every $1,000 he makes on Facebook.
Not every post is a winner, as Facebook’s often-impenetrable algorithm determines what takes off, and the payment program itself has variances (McGaugh notes she’s had a single photo make thousands of dollars, while another viral photo made $13). The shift in monetization also means that many creators have to break away from old strategies of posting longer videos that allow for more ad breaks to focus on shorter videos that hold users’ attention.
While she had initially eschewed Facebook as a platform for older people, McGaugh says she’s seen pretty wide engagement across age groups for her content. Her posts about scams perform well with an elderly audience, but she’s also found an appetite across the board for other topics.
“They’ve been eating up undelivered mail, like, when I buy bulk packages of lost mail, that kind of stuff does super well across the board,” McGaugh says. “People just want to watch you open things.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
