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.”
Nvidia will help train and mentor emerging deep tech startups in India as a founding member of a $2 billion investment alliance, deepening its presence in the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem.
The U.S. chipmaker has joined the India Deep Tech Alliance (IDTA) — a group of private equity and venture capital investors pledging $2 billion for deep tech investments — as a founding member. Deep tech startups are an umbrella term for emerging companies in semiconductors, space, AI, biotech, robotics, and energy.
The world’s most valuable company will offer technical talks and training through its Nvidia Deep Learning Institute to emerging startups in India.
Nvidia wants to “provide guidance on AI systems, developer enablement, and responsible deployment, and to collaborate with policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs,” Vishal Dhupar, Nvidia’s managing director of South Asia, said.
Nvidia did not disclose any financial investment, timeline, or training targets, and did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.
“Nvidia’s depth of expertise in AI systems, software, and ecosystem-building will benefit our network of investors and entrepreneurs,” said Sriram Viswanathan, founding executive council member of the IDTA.
He told CNBC that the pace of innovation is accelerating in India and there could be a “significant number of Indian deep tech companies of global repute” in the next five years.
The Indian government is also actively encouraging research and innovation in the deep tech space through major initiatives, including over 100 billion rupees ($1.1 billion USD) under its AI Mission and a separate 1 trillion rupees ($11.2 billion) Research, Development and Innovation Scheme Fund targeting deep tech companies.
On Monday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the country will host the AI Impact Summit in February next year.
The event is likely to see the participation of heads of state and top policymakers, along with business leaders such as Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of NVIDIA, and Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind.
Nvidia’s commitment in India coincides with rising global interest in India’s AI market, where OpenAI counts the country as its second-largest user base. U.S. rivals are also deepening ties: Google recently pledged $15 billion to build an AI hub in the southern city of Visakhapatnam.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer suggested Wall Street is too fixated the on large valuations of certain tech and speculative stocks, chalking up Tuesday’s market-wide decline in part to Palantir‘s nearly 8% loss despite strong earnings results.
“The larger issue is that we’re at the moment where money managers, when asked if the market’s too expensive, immediately think of the high-flying speculative stocks or those in the high-growth artificial intelligence column, and so they warn you away from the entire asset class,” he said. “These guys don’t think of the other 334 stocks in the S&P 500 that sell for less than 23 times earnings — those aren’t outrageous.”
Declines in Palantir and other artificial intelligence companies helped bring stocks down on Tuesday, with the S&P 500 losing 1.17%,the Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 0.53% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sinking 2.04%. Palantir managed to beat the estimates and offer solid guidance, citing growth in the artificial intelligence business. But investors worried broadly about the huge valuations of tech giants that have been leading the market to new heights.
Investors who saw Palantir as their “north star” were alarmed by its big pullback after a great quarter, according to Cramer. The fears triggered “a raft of selling” as these investors questioned the market as a whole, he continued.
Palantir can be a tough stock to classify, Cramer suggested, saying it straddles two different market segments — one centered around tech and artificial intelligence, and another focused on speculative stocks. He noted that the data-driven software company is very lucrative and fast growing, and it “defies easy description.” He listed off a number of its business arms — including its work as a defense contractor and as a consultant for companies looking to modernize and improve profitability.
To Cramer, it’s reasonable to consider that there’s nothing wrong with Palantir, and it just needs “to cool off in order to grow into its market capitalization.”
“Sure, there are indeed some stocks that are visibly overvalued, and when you pull them apart, many of these valuations can be justified, some can’t,” he said. “I think the Magnificent Seven can be justified on the pace of the growth that’s ahead of them. Same, ultimately, with Palantir.”
Bitcoin‘s fall below $100,000, its lowest level since June, has sparked fears that the worst is yet to come, another so-called crypto winter (a prolonged bear market in cryptocurrencies) that the market wrestles with every time digital currencies sell off hard in a short period of time.
But Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan says that while the retail investor is in “max desperation” mode, he sees that as a reason to bet that a bottoming in crypto prices may materialize sooner rather than later. With Wall Street institutional investor and financial advisor support for bitcoin, and growth in crypto ETFs, he is even willing to go out on a limb and say that amid the heavy selling a new record high for bitcoin before the end of the year isn’t unreasonable.
“It’s almost a tale of two markets,” he said on CNBC’s “Crypto World” on Tuesday. “Crypto retail is in max desperation. We’ve seen leverage blowouts. … the market for sort of crypto native retail is just more depressed than I’ve ever seen it,” he said.
But Hougan believes more crypto trading will continue to shift into an institutionally driven market, “and interestingly, that market is still bullish,” he said.
“When I go out and speak to institutions or financial advisors, they’re still excited to allocate to an asset class that if you pan back and look over the course of a year, is still delivering very strong returns. So my view of the market is we have to get through this retail flush out. We have to hit bottom from a sentiment perspective. I think we’re very close to that,” he added.
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Price of bitcoin and ether over the past year.
The boom in crypto exchange-traded fund launches, including iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and the Fidelity Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) and Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC) is changing the investor composition, and while week-to-week flows into these ETFs have slowed since the second quarter of the year, “we continue to see strong inflows into bitcoin,” Hougan said.
Bitwise’s own Solana staking ETF (BSOL) brought in over $400 million in flows in its first week, he said, though it has sold off sharply in the recent crypto downturn, with a near 20% loss since its Oct. 28 debut.
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This chart is showing BSOL 5 days
Last week, Strategy CEO Michael Saylor told CNBC he thinks bitcoin could reach $150,000 by the end of the year, one among several recent bullish calls on crypto that for now at least look ill-timed. But Hougan said he doesn’t think it’s an outlandish call even as bitcoin hovers near a six-month low.
“I think bitcoin could easily end the year at new all-time highs,” Hougan said. “So that means getting north of about $125,000 up to $130,000. Whether we’ll get all the way to $150,000, we’ll have to see.”
“I do think the sellers are nearing exhaustion and the buyers are still relatively hungry. And when those two things sort of cross paths, again, I think we could end the year close to or at new all-time highs. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to Saylor’s target as well,” he said.
Institutional investors, whom Hougan described as “more maybe even keeled about what’s going on at a fundamental level in crypto” will start to drive the market forward. “But we do have to finish this washout of retail sentiment … I think we’re closer to the end of that than the beginning, but … there always could be a little bit more downside.”