Tech giants are facing scrutiny across the globe, thanks to a massive increase in awareness about data collection practices and how targeted ads can invade user privacy. The king of targeted ads-Facebook, thus, is getting pressure to find alternate sources of income, especially since companies like Apple are making it difficult to stick to its original playbook. Thus, the company is now experimenting with a new feature called ‘Exclusive Stories’ on Instagram, which will help content creators push exclusive content to a select set of paying users (most probably).
The Exclusive Stories feature was first discovered by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, who posted a series of screenshots over the course of last week. Now, Facebook has come out and announced that it is, in fact, working on something.
Exclusive Stories will be very similar to Twitter’s Super Follow feature, which was announced just recently and allows creators to make a buck directly through the app.
While Super Follow is already available, Instagram is still in early stages of developing Exclusive Stories, and has not even passed it to testing yet.
The new stories will be available just like the current ones-on top of the app in glowing circles. However, they will be highlighted with a different color (purple for now), and when a non paying user comes across one, they will be shown that “only members” can view this story. And it goes without saying that paying users will not be able to screenshot these stories.
However, content creators themselves can add exclusive stories to ‘highlights,’ if they wish to do so.
While this might be seen as a cool little addition to the dozens of other features that are already available on Instagram, it could have a much more profound impact than Reels or Stories. Making paid content available on its platform shows a commitment to finding alternate revenue sources, something that has become a big issue for social media platforms these days. While the parent app Facebook already has some monetization features (like the fee it charges for events), this is a first for Instagram, which is clearly following yet another social media platform-Twitter.
With Apple now allowing users to opt out of data sharing (leading to outrage by Facebook) and Google following suite, Facebook is now facing excessive pressure to keep its newly attained $1 trillion valuation.
