Instagram Is Paying Up to $500,000 for Long-Form Video as It Takes On YouTube — What That Means for Your Business
By UVIDSTUDIO · October 30, 2026 · 6 min read · Video & Photography
Instagram is testing videos up to 90 minutes long and quietly paying a handful of creators six figures to post them — but it still isn't sharing ad revenue the way YouTube does. Here's the real signal for a small business's video plan, not the hype.
Instagram spent the last six years teaching advertisers that attention lives in short, vertical clips. The week of October 26, 2026, it started paying some creators six-figure sums to do the opposite: shoot videos as long as 90 minutes. The company is testing a horizontal, long-form format called Features and courting the podcasters and vloggers who built YouTube's ad business to bring their shows to Meta instead. If you've spent years hearing "keep it under 60 seconds," this is the moment to understand what's actually changing — and what isn't.
What happened
Instagram's Features format supports horizontal video for podcasts, interviews, and long-sit-down content, with length limits being tested up to 90 minutes — a sharp break from the Reels-first format the app has pushed since 2020. The test started with a group of creators in Brazil and has since expanded to a select group in the US, with videos also available through an Instagram app on Apple TV, according to Variety. The more striking detail, reported by Business Insider and covered by PetaPixel, is that Meta is negotiating direct payments to a handful of YouTube creators to bring their long-form content over — deals reportedly ranging from roughly $50,000 to $500,000 per creator, and notably non-exclusive, meaning those creators can keep posting the same video to YouTube at the same time.
What Instagram isn't doing yet matters just as much. Unlike YouTube, which shares 55% of ad revenue with Partner Program creators on every video, Instagram has no announced revenue-share model for Features. A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch it's "too early to share a long-term monetization model," and Instagram head Adam Mosseri has been publicly skeptical of paying for content at scale, saying on The Colin and Samir Show that the company "spends more money than we make back by a long shot" on current creator payouts. In short: the long videos are real and expanding, the payments are real for a small, hand-picked group of established creators — but there's no general program an ordinary business or creator can tap into yet.
Why it matters for small businesses
It's tempting to read this as "Instagram is becoming YouTube, go make long videos." That's the wrong lesson for almost every small business. The creators getting six-figure deals already have audiences in the hundreds of thousands or millions on YouTube — Instagram is buying their existing audience's attention, not rewarding long-form video on its own merits. A local service business or boutique retailer posting a 45-minute video into Features today gets none of that negotiated payment and, with no revenue share, no path to ad income from it either. What this story actually signals is competitive: Meta is spending real money because it believes long-form, high-watch-time video is where the next round of ad inventory and brand-safety-conscious advertisers goes next, the same bet that's driving the rise of CTV advertising on streaming apps. That's useful context for planning next year's video budget, even if it changes nothing about what to post this month.
What to do this week
None of this calls for an overnight pivot, but it's a good prompt to sanity-check your video plan before you spend real production budget reacting to a headline.
- Don't shift budget into 90-minute videos yet. The format is in limited testing, has no monetization for ordinary accounts, and most small-business audiences don't want a feature-length watch from a brand they're still getting to know — your short-form content still does the actual discovery and conversion work.
- Keep publishing everywhere you already post, not fewer places. The non-exclusivity detail is the real tell: even Meta's own paid creators are allowed to post the identical video to YouTube. Cross-posting your existing video, rather than picking one platform to bet on, is still the safer play.
- Watch your own Instagram Insights for format shifts, not headlines. If Features opens up broadly and your audience's watch-time behavior actually changes, your analytics will show it before the trade press does — that's the moment to test a longer cut, not now.
- Put any new production budget toward the videos that already convert. A customer testimonial, a behind-the-scenes process video, or a well-shot product demo earns a return regardless of which platform eventually wins the long-form fight; chasing the platform story itself does not.
Instagram's long-form bet is worth tracking because it tells you where the big platforms think attention — and ad dollars — are headed next, the same signal we track for clients weighing AI video tools against a real shoot. It isn't yet a reason to change what a Jersey City or NYC-metro small business posts this week. If you want a video plan built around what's actually converting for your audience right now, not the platform headline of the month, our video and photography team can build that with you.