Facebook will pay out $1 billion to creators over the next year and a half as part of an effort to court content makers to its many services. The money will be awarded to creators who use Facebook products in different ways: on Facebook, creators can get a cash bonus for running ads on their videos or reaching certain tipping milestones during livestreams; on Instagram, creators can get paid for enabling ads on their IGTV videos, getting tipped in livestreams, or creating popular videos on Reels. The money is available to creators on an invitation-only basis for now, and new options for making money will be announced later. Facebook indicated it would expand availability to more creators later in the year, launching a “dedicated place for bonuses within the Instagram app this summer and in the Facebook app this autumn.” The initiative is meant to make Facebook “the best platforms for millions of creators to make a living.” The money will be disbursed by the end of 2022. More recently, apps like TikTok and Snapchat have offered to pay creators outright for posting successful videos to their platform.

Clubhouse launches its new DM feature known as Backchannel

Now, you can slide into people’s Clubhouse DMs. The social audio company is launching its direct messaging feature, Backchannel, for all users on both iOS and Android. For now, users can chat one-on-one, in groups, and send links. They cannot yet send images or videos, but that functionality is coming, along with a “few other features.” There will also be an optional secondary inbox where message requests will live. The functionality is designed to help moderators chat among themselves during an active room; let people connect after an event; and broadly, foster text conversations that otherwise would have to take place in a separate app. This is a critical development for the app, which the company now says has been downloaded over 8 million times on Android devices with more than 500,000 rooms created daily. Its competitors, notably Twitter Spaces and Facebook Live Audio Rooms, both allow people to text chat while also running or participating in an audio conversation, so Backchannel brings Clubhouse more up to par and ensures users keep their conversations, and more of their social life, on the app.