Facebook has had a problem for years that Mark Zuckerberg has not hidden. A platform with more than three billion users simply wasn’t attractive to creators who gravitated to TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. Now, on March 18, 2026, Meta is launching a direct and financially concrete answer to that problem.
Facebook has announced the launch of the “Creator Fast Track” program, designed to help creators grow on the platform with guaranteed earnings and increased content reach. The company also announced that it paid out nearly $3 billion to creators through its monetization programs in 2025, a 35 percent year-over-year increase and the highest annual amount to date.
The mechanism of the program is clear. Creators in the program can earn $1,000 per month if they have at least 100,000 followers on Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, and $3,000 per month if they have more than 1 million followers on any of those platforms. The guaranteed payout lasts for three months and covers the posting of short video formats, known as Reels. To qualify, creators must share at least 15 Reels on Facebook within 30 days, published on at least 10 different days. Content does not have to be exclusive to Facebook, but it must be original, including AI-generated content.
The part concerning access to monetization tools is especially important. The program gives creators immediate access to Facebook’s content monetization tools without meeting the platform’s usual criteria, such as a minimum number of followers, and they can continue earning after the program ends.
Jair Livne, vice president of creative products at Facebook, explained the philosophy behind the program. The creators, says Livne, are worried about the “cold start problem”: they know that Facebook is a different kind of platform, with less video content, more diverse formats and sometimes a different audience, so it seemed to them that starting again from scratch would be laborious.
This is not the first time that Facebook has tried this approach. At the beginning of 2025, during the drama surrounding the possible ban of TikTok, the platform launched a similar program called “Breakthrough Bonus Program” to attract TikTok creators with bonuses and Meta Verified access. The new program seems like a more refined version, with clearer incentives and a stronger long-term monetization perspective.
The number of creators making more than $10,000 a year on Facebook grew by more than 30 percent annually, and Reels accounted for about 60 percent of total payouts to creators in 2025. Facebook is not only competing with TikTok and YouTube in the fight for the audience, but now also directly for the time and exclusivity of the creators who attract that audience, reports Tech Crunch.