Meta and Mark Zuckerberg have a 6-letter downside. It’s simple to spell: Ti-k-To-k.

TikTok has turn into the Scorching Factor in Tech and has amassed a million-plus customers. It’s now threatening Zuckerberg’s social media networks. He admitted as a lot a number of instances in a name with Wall Avenue analysts earlier this week about quarterly earnings, a briefing by which he sought to elucidate his apps’ plateauing development—and an precise decline in Fb’s every day customers, the primary such drop within the firm’s 18-year historical past.

Zuckerberg has insisted a serious a part of his TikTok protection technique is Reels, the TikTon clone—ahem, short-form video format—launched on Instagram and Fb and launched in August 2020.

If Zuckerberg believed in Reels’ long-term viability, he would take an actual run at TikTok by pouring cash into Reels and its creators. There’s some huge cash. YouTube is the largest supply of revenue for celebrities on social media. These creators create content material that draws engaged customers. The platforms promote adverts to look with the content material—extra creators, extra content material, extra customers, extra potential ad income. It’s a virtous cycle.)

Now, right here’s pretty much as good a time as any for a crash course in creator economics. For this, there’s no higher information than Hank Inexperienced, whose YouTube video on the topic just lately went viral. He’s greatest identified for his YouTube channel, which he runs from Montana. His hottest channel is Crash Course (13.1 million subscribers—an enviable YouTube base), to which he posts schooling movies for youths about topics like Black Individuals in World Conflict II and the Israeli-Palestinian battle.

Inexperienced, like probably the most savvy social media entrepreneurs, totally grasps the worth of YouTube as a option to earn cash. YouTube shares 55% all of the ad revenues earned from a video it creates with its creator. “YouTube is sweet at promoting commercials: It’s been round a very long time, and it’s getting higher yearly,” Inexperienced says. Inexperienced earns roughly $2 per 1000 views on YouTube. YouTube gave virtually $16 billion in complete to creators final fiscal yr.

Inexperienced is a person of nice mentality. He has additionally created accounts on TikTok Instagram, Fb and TikTok. TikTok doesn’t come near paying in addition to YouTube: On TikTok, Inexperienced earns pennies per each thousand views.

Meta already provides Reels some payouts. During the last month, Reels has lastly amassed sufficient of an viewers for Inexperienced’s movies to build up 16 million views and earn round 60 cents per thousand views. Many instances over TikTok’s however nonetheless not sufficient to get Inexperienced to divert any substantial his focus to Reels, which has by no means managed to copy TikTok’s zeitgeisty place in popular culture. (Tiktok “has deeper content material, one thing fascinating and peculiar,” explains Inexperienced. Reels, nevertheless, is “very floor stage. None of it’s deeper,” he says.) One other issue weighing on Reels: Meta’s dangerous popularity. “Fb has historically been the corporate that has been sort of worst at being an excellent accomplice to creators,” he says, citing specifically Fb’s earlier pivot to long-form video that led to the demise of a number of promising media startups, like Mic and Mashable.

That is the place Zuckerberg might use Meta’s thick revenue margin (36%, higher even than Alphabet’s) and fats money pile ($48 billion) to shell out YouTube-style money to customers posting Reels, creating an apparent enticement to prioritize Reels over TikTok. Maybe even Reels may very well be extra in style than YouTube’s TikTok rival, Shorts.

Now, think about how somebody like Inexperienced would possibly get extra motivated to consider Meta if Reels’ quantity crept as much as 80 cents or a greenback per thousand views. Or, $1.50. A YouTube-worthy quantity of $2. YouTube earnings can rise as much as $5 and even double, for in style creators.

Meta has allotted as much as $1 billion to those creator checks, which appears big till you take into account the capital Meta presently has. Take into consideration how a lot YouTube has disbursed. Meta additionally acknowledged that it’ll proceed to disburse these funds via December 2022, final July. Meta has set a timeframe to permit them to (most definitely?) disburse the funds. The financing will likely be turned off at Christmas subsequent yr.

Over a few years, Zuckerberg demonstrated his willingness to spend Everest-sized quantities of cash on initiatives that he believes in. Does You totally belief in. Most notably, there may be the Metaverse. It’s the most recent Zuckerberg pivot. Meta spent $10.1 million final yr on this invoice to assist develop new augmented or digital actuality software program. It additionally purchased headsets and employed engineers. In 2022, prices are predicted to rise. Reels apart, Metaverse spending isn’t on a schedule. Wall Avenue has been assured that this splurge will go on for theforeseeable future. Total, Meta’s view on the metaverse appears to be, We’ll spend as a lot as potential—for so long as it takes—for this to occur.

The identical freewheeled mindset doesn’t appear to appply to Reels. However Zuckerberg is aware of he can’t let TikTok take over the short-form video house unopposed. Meta ought to maintain on to the income from Instagram and Fb in order that it may create the metaverse. (Instagram and Fb, for perspective, generated 98% of Meta’s $118 billion income final yr; gross sales of Meta’s VR headset, the Quest 2, accounted for the remaining 2%.) And promoting {dollars} will more and more transfer to short-form video, following customers’ elevated demand for the sort of content material over the past a number of years.

Actuality is, Zuckerberg has already admitted he doesn’t see Reels as a long-term resolution to his T-i-k-T-o-k downside. If he did, he’d spend extra on it and creators like Inexperienced than what the metaverse prices him over six weeks.