How Instagram pays creators: gifts, subscriptions, badges and bonuses

Instagram's Help Center describes four tools that pay creators, each with its own rules:

• Gifts: viewers buy Stars and send them as gifts on your reels.
• Subscriptions: followers pay each month for content only subscribers see.
• Badges: viewers buy badges while you are live.
• Bonuses: programmes Instagram tests with creators it invites, for a limited time.

All four ask for a professional account (creator or business), and every one of them depends on following Instagram's Partner Monetization Policies and Content Monetization Policies as well as the Community Standards. If a tool does not appear in your Professional Dashboard, it is not available to your account yet.

Anyone watching a reel, follower or not, can buy Stars and send you a gift. Instagram pays you US$0.01 for every Star, once a month. It takes its own share when the viewer buys the Stars, and part of the price also goes to Apple or Google, whose in-app purchase fee Instagram describes as typically 30%. Stars come in packs, and Instagram says its own share depends on the size of the pack.

To earn from gifts you need a professional account, to be 18 or older, at least 500 followers, a payout account set up in Instagram, and to agree to the Instagram Gifts Creator Terms. Collaborative posts and accounts that mainly post content focused on children cannot receive gifts. Your earnings show under Gifts in the Professional Dashboard.

Subscriptions let followers pay you monthly for subscriber-only content. The bar is higher than for gifts: a professional account with at least 10,000 followers, 18 or older, and agreeing to the Instagram Subscriptions Terms of Use. Accounts that mainly post content focused on children cannot offer them.

To check, open your Professional Dashboard: if you are eligible, an option to set up subscriptions appears there.

Badges let viewers pay you while you are live, and you turn them on for each live from the Live screen. They need a professional account and a payout account, and Instagram notes the feature may not be available to you yet. A live that breaks the Content Monetization Policies can lose badges, and repeated problems can switch them off for future lives.

Bonuses are tests. Instagram offers them by invitation, for a limited time, in some countries, with an element of random selection. Invitations appear in your Professional Dashboard, and Instagram warns that a genuine one never asks for your username or password. Anyone who does is not Instagram.

Both are open in the same 49 countries. Among them:

• In Latin America: Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Brazil.
• In Europe: Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.
• And the United States, Canada, India, Indonesia, Japan, Turkey and more.

No Arab country is on either list: not Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates or Morocco. There, YouTube's Partner Program and Facebook's content monetization are the programmes that are open, and our guides to both say how they work.

Instagram money comes from people who already like your work: they send gifts, subscribe, or buy badges while you are live. So it grows with a loyal audience, not with raw views, and a reel that goes wide but reaches no one who cares earns little. Gifts and badges are paid by viewers with their own money, which makes them a fair measure of how much people value what you post.

That makes Instagram a good place to build the audience and a partial place to earn from it. Post reels that are your own, keep the same people coming back, and add Subscriptions once you pass 10,000 followers. If you live outside the 49 countries, use Instagram to be found and earn where you can: on YouTube or Facebook.