meta has announced that it tests the minting and selling of NFTs on Instagram, as you can with many traditional NFT marketplaces, with a “small group of creators in the US” getting access to the feature first. The company is also expanding Instagram’s NFT showcase feature, which it recently made available to users in more than 100 countries. The announcement comes under the news of several new ways for creators to monetize their platforms.
Meta says its digital collectibles toolkit will allow people to create NFTs on the Polygon blockchain (as always, no relationship to polygon the video game newscast) and then sell them on Instagram or off the platform. When it comes to displaying NFTs you’ve bought elsewhere, the company says you can now show off those of the Solana blockchain, in addition to the Ethereum, Polygon, and Flow blockchains that the feature already supported. It also adds some OpenSea metadata to the screen, similar to what Twitter does for its NFT profile picture feature.
All of this is because Meta is adding new ways for creators to monetize its platforms. on Monday, it was announced it expands the Professional Mode rollout, which gives you access to certain monetization tools and options, such as the Stars virtual currency tipping system (which it also expands). It also adds something called gifts on Instagram where fans can basically send money to a creator while watching one of their reels – the gifts are bought with stars, of course. Like the NFT creation tools, this is tentatively being tested with a few US-based creators.
As Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, said last year, Meta no longer sees Instagram as a photo-sharing app, but as an entertainment app. And entertainers need to make money, whether it’s through somewhat traditional methods like ad revenue sharing, or by selling NFTs and getting fans to send them money directly in the form of gifts, coins, or stars.