Meta no longer pays authors for publishing on Threads. The company quietly ended the Threads bonus program, which offered some authors thousands of dollars a month, earlier this year, Engadget confirmed.
The company hasn’t officially commented on why it stopped paying out, but the Instagram support page, which once contained detailed information about the creator incentives, no longer mentions Threads at all. In posts on Threads, authors who once participated in the program report that they stopped receiving payments around the end of April. This is about a year after Meta first started paying authors for popular posts. Although Meta has never publicly shared details about how the program works, authors who have previously spoken to Engadget have reported that they could receive monthly bonuses of $500 to $5000 in exchange for reaching certain post and view counts.
It is currently unclear what Meta’s strategy for authors on Threads will be in the future. The company is still trying to attract more brands and celebrities to the platform and has tested features that help people find popular creators they previously followed on X. Meta has also added creator-friendly tools, such as the ability to add more links to profiles and more detailed analytics for the app.
But Meta has yet to explain what it can offer creators in return. The platform drives almost no traffic to third-party websites. It is also much more difficult to build a group of followers on Threads, as the platform uses an algorithmic timeline consisting mainly of recommended content by default. This means that it is easier for a post from an unknown account to go viral, but viral posts rarely lead to an influx of new followers.
The target may simply rely on the fact that Threads already has enough momentum without paying people for viral content. At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly stated that he believes the app can become the next Meta platform with a billion audience. It is hard to imagine how this will happen without the participation of creators.
