Instagram said on Monday that it is testing "Features", video uploads of up to 90 minutes — a format roughly sixty times the length of the Reels that built the platform's last five years. The test starts in Brazil and expands to a small US group.
What changes
Creators will be able to publish long-form video to their profile and, with a second feature called "Clips as Reels", cut short vertical clips from it that link back to the full video. Long videos can be saved to the Instagram app on a TV, and the company is working on a profile hub for episodic Reels plus better discovery for Live.
For Instagram, the logic is retention. If a creator's audience already watches them for an hour, splitting that time between Instagram and YouTube hands the second half to a competitor — and takes the ad inventory with it.
Mosseri's reversal
"For a long time, I have been against doing long-form video on Instagram," Adam Mosseri, who runs the platform, said in a video announcement. He credited Tessa Lyons, vice president of product, with changing his mind. "Reels is still going to be a core part of Instagram," Lyons said. "But when you want to go deeper with the creators you love and the content that they're creating, you should be able to do that on Instagram."
It is not the first attempt. IGTV launched in 2018 as a standalone long-form app and was folded into the main app and then shut down. What is different now is that the surrounding product — Reels distribution, a TV app, and a creator economy that has largely given up on short-form payouts — exists.
The money problem
The reason creators treat Instagram as a shop window rather than a business is simple. "You can get paid by the platform directly, you can get paid by a fan, and you can get paid by a brand," Mosseri said on the Colin and Samir Show. "And right now, the way that it works on Instagram primarily is you primarily get paid by brands." He added that Instagram's performance-based programme spends more than it earns back: "we're just burning capital".
YouTube does it differently. Creators in the Partner Program take 55% of the ad revenue their videos generate, and the company said last year it had paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies over four years. Short-form is harder to monetise because there is less room for ads — which is exactly why long-form is the format that could make Instagram a place people get paid to post.
Meta is not promising that yet. "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," a spokesperson told TechCrunch — not a yes, but not a no.
What to watch
The test will be judged on two numbers: how many creators upload long-form to Instagram rather than YouTube, and whether Meta puts ads inside those videos. If it does, the 55% benchmark becomes the obvious comparison, and the creator-economy conversation shifts from reach to revenue. If it does not, Features is a retention feature wearing a monetisation story — and IGTV's fate is the precedent.
