Instagram Just Opened a 90-Minute Video Door. Nobody Gets Paid to Walk Through It.

Adam Mosseri spent years explaining why long-form video did not belong on Instagram. On Monday he posted a horizontal video explaining why it does.

Instagram has begun testing "Features," a format that lets creators upload horizontal videos of up to 90 minutes. Mosseri and VP of Product Tessa Lyons announced the test on 26 October in a video on the platform. In it, Mosseri admitted that "[f]or a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram."

That is the product story, and it's already everywhere. Here's the part that matters if your business is selling knowledge: there is no payout attached to any of it.

The format

The test is starting with a small group of creators in the US, with some in Brazil also taking part, Instagram spokesperson Megan Buckley told The Verge. Features will appear in users' main feeds and on the Explore page, and Instagram is also testing Reels that link to a full-length Feature. Creators will be able to link up to eight short Reels to a single long video.

Read that again slowly, because it's the whole opportunity. A short clip that routes a cold viewer into a 90-minute video, inside the app, with the algorithm doing the distribution. Those clips act as top-of-funnel for the long-form video, creating a native pathway from short to long that has historically not existed on Instagram.

It also lands on the biggest screen in the house. Instagram's TV app has reached Apple TV in the US and will carry Features, and Lyons said the company believes the best viewing experience for long-form horizontal video is on a large screen.

The format is being pitched at podcasters, comedians and other long-form creators. Nobody at Meta said anything about course sellers. That is usually when a surface is cheapest.

The money

For now, Instagram is still not planning a revenue-sharing program akin to YouTube's that would compensate creators for sharing their work on the platform.

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch: "It's too early to share a long-term monetization model, but we're exploring ways for creators to earn from brands, fans, and Instagram, including performance-based incentives."

There is some money moving, just not systematically. An Instagram rep said the platform is providing funding for longer-form content "directly with some creators right now to support them." Lyons told The Hollywood Reporter that Instagram is working on "a few different deals" with early Features creators, and that existing ad deals will carry over into the videos.

Compare that to the thing it's attacking. YouTube offers qualified creators 55 percent of ad revenue, a predictable and scalable income stream.

Creators noticed immediately. Under the announcement, top comments asked why anyone would post "an unpaid long video on Instagram" when YouTube pays for the same work.

They're right, if your business model is views.

Why an unpaid surface is good news for one specific business

If you sell a course, a cohort, a membership or a coaching program, you were never getting paid per view anyway. You've been paying to be seen — ads, agencies, bidding against everyone else for the same four seconds of attention.

Strip out the ad revenue question and what's left is a distribution channel where:

• the unit of content is 90 minutes, which is roughly a webinar
• short clips are an official, product-supported entrance to the long video
• the destination can be a TV in a living room
• and the only person who can monetize that attention is the one with an offer at the end

This is the structural reason the early days of a platform are always the best days. Everyone else in the test group is weighing whether to hand a free 90 minutes to a company that hasn't committed to paying them. A course seller runs that math differently, because the 90 minutes was always the marketing, not the product.

The discipline required is real. Ninety minutes of free attention converts nothing if the video is a lecture. The creators who will make this work already know how to teach for an hour and ask for the sale in the last ten minutes without the room emptying.

Three things to check before you rearrange your content calendar

You probably can't post yet. It's a small US group plus some creators in Brazil, with Mosseri saying features roll out this month and reach more users over time.

You don't have to choose. The videos will not be exclusive to Instagram. The same recording can keep earning on YouTube.

Background audio isn't there. As it stands, users can't leave the app and keep listening to a Feature, though Mosseri said it could be implemented in the future. If your plan was passive podcast listening, wait.

The quiet reason this is a real reversal

Mosseri's old objection was never that long video was bad. It was that long video eats the behavior Instagram runs on. Watching 10 or 20 or 30 minutes, he said, is "a lot of Reels, photos and carousels that you might not have sent to a friend" — fewer shares, fewer DMs, less of the thing that makes the app the app.

He's now betting the two formats can feed each other instead. He thinks the Clips as Reels system is what makes short-form and long-form "symbiotic." He also conceded it's "going to take some time to get right."

The window for anyone selling knowledge is exactly that sentence. A format nobody has optimized, a payout model nobody has announced, and a company that says it wants to be, in Mosseri's words, "the most culturally relevant platform."

Whoever posts first finds out what a 90-minute Instagram video is actually worth.