As a result of Meta’s bonus program, some individuals are able to generate thousands of dollars per month.
An artist who was able to pay off her credit card debt, a photographer who is able to make additional money by responding to the most controversial postings she can find, and a food blogger who is attempting to generate intriguing conversations are all examples of people we have encountered. This is a selection of the creators that Meta is paying to have their work posted on Threads.
The invitation-only initiative was first presented by Meta in April, but the company has only provided a limited amount of information regarding its operation. Over the course of the past few months, sixty creators have joined the program, and Newtechmania had the opportunity to speak with them. The tactics that they had developed in order to achieve the requisite engagement metrics were detailed, as was the often perplexing nature of the recommendation system that Threads implemented.
Creators are placed into several tiers of the program, which sets the maximum amount of bonuses they are eligible for and the kind of metrics that their articles must meet in order to be considered successful. Despite the fact that they all had a significant number of followers on Instagram, none of the creators who communicated with Newtechmania were aware of how or why they had been chosen for the bonus program. (A professional account on Instagram is one of the requirements that is already known to exist.)
Photographer Audrey Woulard has almost 25,000 followers on Instagram and over 5,500 followers on Threads. She is featured in a number of publications. She promotes her portrait photography company through her Facebook and Instagram pages both on Facebook and Instagram. On the other hand, when she was invited to participate in the Threads bonus program, she recognized an opportunity to experiment with various kinds of content she could create.
According to her, her method is centered entirely on responses. Rather than participating in the creation of her own postings, she is solely concerned with responding to those of other people. The explanation that she gives is that “I’m not necessarily generating content on my own.” “I’m kind of activating the content that belongs to other people.” It is her belief that she is able to achieve the requisite sixty Threads with a minimum of seven hundred and fifty views each in order to be eligible for a monthly bonus of five hundred dollars.
The result of this is that she has developed a heightened awareness of the kinds of topics that are likely to get a significant number of opinions. Providing an explanation, she says, “Polarizing content, anything that keeps people talking.” To be more specific, she searches for subjects that people have a tendency to have strong opinions about, such as marriage, parenthood, aging, and politics. However, she makes an effort to avoid responding to blatant engagement bait.
Woulard’s experience is not special in any way. The default timeline for Threads is a “for you” timeline, which places a greater emphasis on posts that are recommended to you rather than postings from accounts that you already follow. In addition, Meta has stated that it does not intend to “encourage” users to publish things related to politics and the news. Perhaps as a result of this, the “for you” feed on Threads frequently gives the impression of being much slower and less engaged with current events than the feed on X does.
However, the algorithm does give preference to postings that receive a large number of responses, even if the subject matter of the post is something that appears to be unremarkable. The result of this is that the feed has taken on a peculiarly random aspect, which blogger Max Read has referred to as “the gas leak social network.” It is not unusual to come across a post that has been recommended to you by someone with whom you have no connection whatsoever sharing a story about a little nuisance, a medical ailment, or some other anecdote that is not really interesting. On the other hand, these posts do share one thing in common: a large number of responses.
It has also created a chance for individuals who are interested in gaming the algorithm of the app by uploading content that is spammy, questions that are generic, or opinions that are divisive in order to garner as many responses as possible. After a boom in posts of this nature, executives at Meta have stated that they are working to find a solution to the problem, despite the fact that they acknowledge that posts that include responses are more likely to be recommended.
Woulard, on the other hand, has benefited from Meta’s emphasis on “public conversations” because it has helped her. By merely responding to Threads, she claims that she has been able to accumulate a total of three months’ worth of bonuses from this point on. Despite the fact that Woulard’s Facebook page brings in a greater amount of money, she finds the Threads bonus program to be more straightforward. My ability to create this money is so simple that I can actually sit in my room and respond to a large number of messages in a span of thirty minutes.
One of the strategies that Meta employs in order to utilize Instagram in order to expand the service that has been around for a year is to provide incentives to Instagram producers who publish on Threads. In order to expand Threads, which has already attracted 200 million users, the company has placed a significant amount of emphasis on Instagram. However, according to social media strategist Matt Navarra, there were sure to be some growing pains over the course of the project.
“I believe that people find it more difficult to create for platforms such as Threads,” Navarra says in an interview with Newtechmania. “Writing posts that are intriguing and engaging for a text-based medium such as X, Twitter, or Threads requires a distinct set of abilities than other types of platforms. And I believe that it can be a little bit challenging for certain types of creators.
An artist named Josh Kirkham, who specializes in creating painting movies in the style of Bob Ross, has personal experience with this phenomenon. He is in the top tier of the bonus program, which means that he is entitled to earn up to $5,000 per month from his posts on Threads. His Instagram followers number close to 800,000, which places him in the highest tier. By uploading videos of himself painting that were taken from his livestreams on Instagram and TikTok, he has been able to maximize the amount of his bonus.
In spite of the fact that he has been successful, he has not been able to identify any trends regarding the kinds of videos that are most likely to be successful. More than one hundred fifty thousand people follow him on Threads; but, much like the other authors who are participating in the bonus program, he depends on the recommendation system of the app for his postings to be discovered. “In the beginning, I was posting mountain videos, and those were doing the best compared to everything else,” he adds. “But then, a week later, every mountain video was just getting like absolutely nothing.” I have noticed that there are occasions when videos that I believe are going to be successful do not perform well at all, and vice versa.
Kirkham claims that he virtually never responds to posts on Threads while he is attempting to reach a bonus because he is concerned that doing so will reduce his chances of achieving the 5,000 views per post that are required to receive the maximum payout. Despite this, he expresses his appreciation for the show, stating that he is an artist and creator who works full-time. According to him, “It has made it possible for me to pay off my credit card debt and then raise my credit score by a significant amount.” It is my hope that there will be at least a couple more.
Almost all of the creators who were interviewed by Newtechmania voiced some degree of skepticism regarding the possibility that Meta would maintain the bonus program at its current level for an extended period of time. In the past, the business has provided creators with substantial bonuses when it was attempting to promote a new format such as Instagram Reels or Facebook Live. However, these payments soon decreased as more people joined the platform, and Meta finally shifted its strategy — and cash for creators — to another location.
In addition to having around 8,500 followers on Threads, photographer Logan Reavis has roughly 50,000 followers on Instagram. Despite the fact that she has a larger following on Instagram, she claims that the algorithm of Threads is far more beneficial to producers. It is especially true for a photographer that the [Threads] algorithm operates in a completely different manner, she comments. I have the impression that it is difficult to post my picture on Instagram, although we are urged to do so on Threads. I am genuinely able to communicate with a completely different audience.
Despite this, she claims that she has been forced to deal with the peculiarities of the Threads algorithm, which has a tendency to accentuate interaction bait. “Responding to threads that have a lot of comments or conversation is what brings in my bonus views more,” she says. “This not only frustrates me because there is a lot of clickbait, but it also brings in more bonus views.” To this point, Reavis has not been successful in reaching her maximum potential monthly bonus of $500 thanks to Threads.
Despite the fact that creators are a cornerstone of Meta’s strategy to develop Threads its next billion-person app, the firm has not always been able to articulate what the purpose of its most recent app is. That even the creators that it is paying to post there consider it to be something of an experiment is therefore not something that should come as a surprise.
According to Navarra, “I still do not believe that it has its own unique place when it comes to the ecosystem of social media.” It does not really have much of its own identity or personality, and I believe that this is one of the many challenges that it is experiencing at the time.