Instagram chases YouTube’s TV watch time with 90-minute uploads. Will creators get paid, though?

Heads up, Netflix and Disney: Instagram wants a piece of YouTube‘s TV watch time, too.

“We’ve been hearing for a long time that people love to watch Reels together in their living rooms with their friends, so we’ve been working on a TV version of Reels,” Tessa Lyons, Instagram’s VP of Product, said in an announcement video alongside chief Adam Mosseri. “And we know to do that well, we need more than just short-form video.”

As a result of this insight, Instagram is testing a creatively named new feature, Features, that will let creators populate its platform with horizontal videos up to 90 minutes long.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Instagram hopes Features will appeal to long-form content creators, podcasters, and comedians. It has already tested Features with some long-form creators in Brazil and plans to expand to “tens of thousands of creators” in the U.S. over the coming months.

Creators using Features will also get access to a tool YouTubers (and anyone else who’s been clued in to the clipping scene) will find familiar: Clips as Reels, which lets creators excerpt short segments from their Features videos and post them as standalone shorts on Instagram’s TikTok copycat.

The clipped Reels will automatically link out to the long-form video from which they were taken.

“What you’re now going to be able to do is, you see a clip of a podcast that you love, you can just click and continue watching or watch the full video, and you’ll be able to dive in and see the whole thing because creators are going to be able to link these Reels to their overall feature,” Lyons said.

THR reports Instagram plans to recommend posts made with Clips as Reels on its Explore page and in other areas around the platform.

For his part in the announcement video, Mosseri admitted that “[f]or a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram.”

But he thinks the secret sauce is the Clips as Reels system, which is “trying to make it so that the short-form and the long-form videos can be symbiotic.”

“We’re going to try to support these different types of formats, both in the mobile app, but also on the TV app, which […] is going to take some time to get it right,” he added. “But I’m actually very excited about it, and we’re very committed to it long-term.”

For us, the elephant in the room is ad revenue. YouTube, at the core of its business model, is set up to pass ad revenue on to creators. That’s why creators benefit from the prevalence of long-form content being watched on desktops, mobile, and (especially) on TVs.

More watch time in a premium locale like the living room TV means more command of high-value audience attention, which means more attention from brands, higher CPMs–and, if all goes well, more money in creators’ pockets.

Instagram is owned by Meta, one of the biggest digital ad businesses in the world. It would stand to reason that if Insta (which, like everyone else, has struggled to effectively monetize short-form video) is embracing longer content and also gunning for TV watch time, Meta will run ads against creators’ long-form uploads.

If that happens, how does Instagram plan to reward creators for making all that revenue-earning content?

“It’s too early to share a long-term monetization model, but we’re exploring ways for creators to earn from brands, fans, and Instagram, including performance-based incentives,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “Over time, we think there will be compounding benefits for creators to tell new stories, reach new audiences, and find new partners, which should lead to many monetization opportunities.”

Is that the corporate equivalent of your parents saying We’ll see? Maybe. For now at least, it seems creators won’t earn extra money from uploading Features.

So will all this work out? Also maybe. Instagram tried doing TV in 2018, with little success–RIP, IGTV–but we’re in a wildly different era now, and 90 minutes is Instagram’s girthiest content limit to date. It might be able to follow the footprints YouTube left years ago.

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