Under the post in which Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced longer videos on 26 October, a comment appeared: “Honestly if it's not coming with payments, I'm gonna save my longform editing for YouTube.” The platform, which is offering creators horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes in a test, is not yet giving them a share of ad revenue for those videos. A small group of creators in the US is trying out the new Instagram Features format, and creators in Brazil are taking part too, a company spokesperson said. With it, Instagram is targeting podcasters, comedians and other creators who want to share full shows.
As recently as July 2024, Mosseri rejected long-form video. Short video connects friends through shared interests. When a Reel makes someone laugh, they pass it on to people they know. With a ten- or twenty-minute video, a person sees fewer posts from friends and sends it to someone less often. Instagram would not go into the long-form video business, he said at the time.
Now the company is going into the long-form video business after all. In a new video shot in landscape, Mosseri sits next to vice president of product Tessa Lyons and says: “For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram, as Tessa here knows very well.” Long horizontal video, according to Lyons, is best watched on a big horizontal screen. The aim is to move viewing to the TV app, but the new videos will also play on phones.
The Reel as a signpost
On the phone, the Reel, which was meant to travel between friends, is supposed to lead the viewer to the full episode. Creators were already using Reels to promote shorter clips from long videos they had published elsewhere. The company noticed, and in Features creators can add up to eight Reels to a full video, each linking directly to it. A viewer can discover a long video they come to like through a Reel carrying a clip from it, Lyons says.
Podcast listeners in Czechia most often play and discover podcasts on YouTube. The Median agency carried out the research for Czech Radio in April 2025 on a sample of 2,524 respondents from the internet population aged 15 to 70. At a conference, podcaster Čestmír Strakatý said: “YouTube does an awful lot of reach, and that's actually often where you get the most organic reach you can achieve with a podcast.”
The bill for the long edit
Besides reach, YouTube gives partners who switch on ads on the watch page 55% of net ad revenue from their public videos. In the four years to September 2025, its payouts to creators, artists and media companies around the world exceeded $100 billion.
For now, though, Instagram is paying only some creators directly for long-form video. According to the company, it is still too early to announce a long-term monetisation model. But Instagram has not ruled out a share of ad revenue in Features in the future. It is exploring how creators could earn from fans, from the platform itself, including performance-based rewards, and from brands.
Instagram is betting on brands in Features too. Established creators can bring their existing ad deals and branded content into the videos. According to Lyons, the company is negotiating several different deals with the first creators, but none of them includes exclusive publication on Instagram for now. It sees a big opportunity among creators who do not yet have that kind of backing and business behind them.
Instagram has offered creators an ad business in long-form video once before. From June 2018, the IGTV format played full-screen vertical videos, each up to an hour long. In February 2022, Instagram announced that, to focus on Reels, it would stop supporting In-Stream ads, formerly known as IGTV ads. It promised creators who had been earning from them a temporary monthly payment based on their recent earnings.
On Instagram today, creators are paid mainly by brands and some by fans, the head of Instagram said in an interview. According to Mosseri, the small performance programme through which Instagram pays creators directly costs more than it earns, so expanding it makes no sense.
Comments