As part of the deals that Meta is offering, creators must promote Instagram twice a month on other short-form video platforms, including Snapchat, Google’s YouTube Shorts and others, according to details of a contract offered to a creator that was reviewed by CNBC.
The contract also requires three months of posting exclusivity on Instagram’s Reels short-form video product before the creator can post content elsewhere.
These deals last six months and obligate a creator to post a minimum of eight Instagram Reels per month, with at least one more post on Instagram than any other platforms. The creator is also required to share content to their Instagram Story twice a month.
To meet these requirements, the posts cannot be part of a brand deal, which is an agreement where creators are compensated to post content on their account that promotes a brand.
The contract reviewed by CNBC is an example of a mid-tier deal that Meta is offering to creators. The social media company is also offering terms varying in amount of deliverables and compensation based on the size of the audience, according to people familiar with the matter.
The Information on Monday reported that Instagram is offering creators with large TikTok followings cash bonuses ranging from $10,000 to $50,000 per month for a creator to shift their videos to Instagram Reels.
Meta said it has also announced several new features for creators, including a video creation app called Edits, the expansion of Reels to three minutes and a new bonus program for creator monetization.
Creators make these platforms
This push by Instagram underscores the high stakes in the social media landscape, where platforms are vying to capture the attention of millions of users while TikTok’s future hangs in the balance.
TikTok shut down in the U.S. for a few hours last week after the Supreme Court upheld a law that was signed by former President Joe Biden in April. That law forced China-based ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok or face an effective ban of the app in the U.S. on Jan. 19. As a result of the law, Apple and Google also pulled TikTok from its app stores in the U.S.
The app, however, began working again in the U.S. after President Donald Trump said he would delay the ban. Trump followed through on Monday and signed the executive order, which delays enforcement of the ban by 75 days.
For Meta, paying creators to promote Instagram could be an effective strategy to regain the app’s foothold as the most popular social media platform among teens and young adults after TikTok surpassed it in popularity in recent years.
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 63% of teens aged 13 to 17 say they use TikTok compared to 59% who use Instagram.
Many TikTok creators rely on brand deals as a primary way of generating income, with payments often depending on the size of their followings. With TikTok’s future in limbo, brands are pausing or altering their agreements to include competing platforms.
“Advertising has been paused, and it’s causing a lot of anxiety and a lot of lost revenue,” said Dan Weinstein, co-CEO of Underscore Talent, an agency that manages many top internet creators.
Amid the uncertainty, advertisers and creators are in a wait-and-see mode, and brands are diversifying their social media strategies beyond TikTok by incorporating platforms like Instagram and YouTube Shorts into agreements, Weinstein said.
Jumping from one platform to another does not guarantee success for creators. Many who were popular on TikTok can struggle to develop an audience on other apps.
“It’s hard for a lot of creators on TikTok to necessarily make the move to traditional YouTube or traditional Instagram,” says Jacob Wallach, founder & CEO of Social4TheWin, a social media consultancy. “You have YouTube Shorts, you have Instagram Reels. You can repurpose that content onto these platforms, but the algorithm is different.”
Meta isn’t the only company looking to pounce on creators who are looking for new revenue streams.
Substack on Thursdayannounced a $20 million Creator Accelerator Fund to help creators transfer and grow their paid subscriptions. Substack is a platform that allows writers and creators to publish newsletters and generate revenue for their content through subscriptions.
Some creators are also flocking to other foreign platforms as well.
RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, was the top free app on Apple’s app store last week and has rapidly gained traction among users looking for alternatives amid the uncertainty with TikTok. RedNote offers a platform for video sharing similar to TikTok.
According to a study by Captiv8, 67% of TikTok creators surveyed are considering RedNote as their preferred alternative.
“The real reason why people ran to Xiaohongshu was not because it’s a better platform, by any means, but because it’s almost kind of like a screw you to the U.S. government,” Wallach said.
As other platforms actively court creators in response to TikTok’s uncertain future, the value of these digital influencers becomes ever clearer, Wallach said.
“Creators are the ones who make these platforms. Without them, it’s like having a town square with no entertainment,” Wallach said. “Creators are the reason why all of these platforms are successful.”
Founded in 2022, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup based in London. It competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
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LONDON — ElevenLabs, a London-based startup that specializes in generating synthetic voices through artificial intelligence, has revealed plans to be IPO-ready within five years.
The company told CNBC it is targeting major global expansion as it prepares for an initial public offering.
“We expect to build more hubs in Europe, Asia and South America, and just keep scaling,” Mati Staniszewski, ElevenLabs’ CEO and co-founder, told CNBC in an interview at the firm’s London office.
He identified Paris, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico as potential new locations. London is currently ElevenLabs’ biggest office, followed by New York, Warsaw, San Francisco, Japan, India and Bangalore.
Staniszewski said the eventual aim is to get the company ready for an IPO in the next five years.
“From a commercial standpoint, we would like to be ready for an IPO in that time,” he said. “If the market is right, we would like to create a public company … that’s going to be here for the next generation.”
Undecided on location
Founded in 2022 by Staniszewski and Piotr Dąbkowski, ElevenLabs is an AI voice generation startup that competes with the likes of Speechmatics and Hume AI.
The company divides its business into three main camps: consumer-facing voice assistants, integrations with corporates such as Cisco, and tailor-made applications for specific industries like health care.
Staniszewski said the firm hasn’t yet decided where it could list, but that this decision will largely rest on where most of its users are located at the time.
“If the U.K. is able to start accelerating,” ElevenLabs will consider London as a listing destination, Staniszewski said.
The city has faced criticisms from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that its stock market is unfavorable toward high-growth tech firms.
Meanwhile, British money transfer firm Wiselast month said it plans to move its primary listing location to the U.S.,
Fundraising plans
ElevenLabs was valued at $3.3 billion following a recent $180 million funding round. The company is backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and ICONIQ Growth, as well as corporate names like Salesforce and Deutsche Telekom.
Staniszewski said his startup was open to raising more money from VCs, but it would depend on whether it sees a valid business need, like scaling further in other markets. “The way we try to raise is very much like, if there’s a bet we want to take, to accelerate that bet [we will] take the money,” he said.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
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Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.