A few months later, the Reels Play Bonus was his next chance-and face filters were the key to his success. Had he started making videos when the program began, he could have made much more. In about a month, he earned more than enough to buy a Tesla.ĭespite the huge profit Beifluss made off this new feature, he couldn’t help feeling disappointed. After a few dry weeks, he received multiple five-figure bonuses. In June of 2021, Beilfuss belatedly realized that he could compete and began posting thirty videos a day. In the first ten months of the program, launched in November, 2020, several creators had capitalized on the relatively low competition and earned millions of dollars for creating short, catchy videos. But as his TikTok account rose toward a million followers in 2020, Beilfuss faced constant pressure from the app, which repeatedly took down his videos for containing what was termed “Dangerous Acts.” He looked to Snapchat, which, in an attempt to compete in the short-video realm, was paying out a million dollars a day to creators who posted viral content on its new TikTok clone, Snapchat Spotlight. By mass-producing face-filter videos, aspiring creators who had previously struggled to find an audience on Instagram saw their accounts balloon to hundreds of thousands of followers and their videos reach hundreds of millions per month.ĭrew Beilfuss had posted skateboarding videos for six years before he gained consistent online viewership. Within a few months of the Reels Play Bonus announcement, dozens of others-from popular YouTube and TikTok creators to a recently divorced mother with no previous online following-seized the opportunity. Koch and Andersen were not the only ones who jumped on the trend. “I do it every day to make sure I can pay my rent, dude,” Koch said. But as long as fifteen minutes a day allows them to forgo full-time jobs and focus on music, they will continue to pump out face-filter videos. Nor do they understand why Instagram pushes their low-effort content to millions of people. They don’t know who watches their videos and why they choose to do so. The duo had exploited a trend that still baffles them almost a year later. For good measure, Andersen began posting face-filter videos on his personal account, too. When he and Andersen began churning out face-filter videos for their new band, Instagram granted them a maximum monthly bonus of thirty-five thousand dollars. During his second month enrolled in the new bonus program, he hit his maximum monthly allowance-a thousand dollars-and watched his follower count climb by thousands. A filter that covered half his face with his random celebrity twin (Margot Robbie) got nearly forty-eight million views. The Instagram algorithm rewarded this extraordinary proliferation of content. “That’s awesome.” He began posting six to eight face-filter videos a day, and, weeks later, after receiving advice from mentors in the music industry to post more, upped his daily production to between sixteen and thirty. “I was, like, Oh, my God, I made ten bucks for doing that?” he recalled. Countless clips of people gazing at the camera as a question floated above their heads: “What Disney princess are you?” “How many children will you have?” “What astrological sign is your true love?” A few seconds later, the filter reveals a randomly generated answer (“Snow White!” “Twelve!” “Sagittarius!”) and those in front of the camera react as if they had won the lottery or sprained an ankle.Īfter spending a few minutes one night making face-filter videos, Koch woke up the next morning to find money waiting for him in his Instagram account. The answer, in large part, was face-filter videos. Koch ignored the offer at first, but changed his mind and looked at what others were posting on Reels. By October of 2021, he had more than twenty thousand followers, an audience that was large enough for Instagram to select him for the Reels Play Bonus, a new program that paid creators for the views they got on short-form videos known as Reels. Koch, who is twenty-five, had been promoting his solo music on Instagram for years. Though the advice didn’t exactly testify to music’s transcendent power, it made some sense to Koch. The content was less important than the frequency the gold standard was four posts a day. When Christian Koch and Aren Andersen began making pop songs together, in early 2020, most everyone in Nashville gave them the same advice: coming up with quality songs was great, but if they wanted traction for their band, they needed to post on TikTok and Instagram.
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