Toronto content creator says Instagram owes her nearly $4,000

A Toronto DJ and content creator says Instagram owes her nearly $4,000 in dues that have not been paid for close to a year.

The 20-year-old university student, known as Angelphroot on the platform, has more than 67,000 followers. She is eligible to monetize her content through Instagram’s “reels bonus” program and get paid for creating engaging videos.

“The amount that I owe in tuition, it’s a little bit over $3,000, could be paid off with the amount that Instagram owes me,” Angelina Nayyar tells CityNews.

The program offers monetary bonuses for garnering a certain number of views on an Instagram reel — the platform’s short video format — within a set time period. If you get the maximum number of views specified, you earn the maximum amount offered. If not, compensation is based on the number of views you do get. The terms of the program change often, as does the amount you can earn.

“For the first bonus, it was a maximum bonus of $500 for a couple of thousand views. I ended up gaining 300,000 views. So I got paid the first time – $500,” says Nayyar. “After that, I was earning bonuses for the number of views that would earn  $2,000 or $1,000 and then I just wasn’t paid for any of them.”

Nayyar explains that she began to look at Instagram as a source of income after she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in the summer of 2021.

“[Ulcerative colitis] is immuno-compromising. So because of how debilitating the disease was and being in a pandemic, I didn’t go out for a very long time. I was stuck inside for seven consecutive months, and I left twice to go to the hospital,” she says.

“I was worried that I might not be able to work a regular job. In that same summer of 2021, Instagram introduced its reels bonus program. So I thought, why don’t I just really focus on this content creation thing and hopefully try and turn it into a little bit of an income source just in case I can’t work.”

She says she began treating content creation like her full-time job, researching how best to maximize her efforts and ensure success.

“I have so many creators that I followed that would post videos about the newest update to Instagram or the newest algorithm update. I literally filled notebooks, taking notes [about things like] what’s the best hashtag strategy — I spent hours and hours late into the night figuring that out. And the next morning, I would wake up posting four or five videos a day,” she explains. “I wasn’t just like, ‘this is my face, and I’m pretty,’ and then I blew up.”

“It was actually for me, very calculated and a lot of effort that I put into learning how to do it strategically.”

Nayyar says she was thrilled when her efforts paid off, but despite trying various different ways of contacting Instagram and its parent company, Meta, she hasn’t been able to get them to do the same.

“Just finding out how to contact them is a very convoluted process because they don’t have any direct support numbers or emails at all,” she says.

“I have tried every single possible avenue — I’ve gone through Facebook, I’ve gone through their Meta platform, their creator’s suite platform. I’ve emailed them directly [through] their contact form — and every time, I have dozens of emails back and forth, they just keep saying, we’re looking into it, we can’t do anything about it.”

When CityNews reached out to Instagram’s parent company Meta, they said they investigated the issue and found that “there was a small bug preventing this creator from being properly enrolled in the program to receive payments.”

“The Instagram support team will reach out to the creator directly to make sure she’s properly enrolled. We apologize for any inconvenience we’ve caused her,” they added.

Nayyar says content creators like her deserve to be treated better and should not have to contact a news station to find solutions.

“To me, it’s kind of an issue with the accountability as well for Instagram. If I was, for example, a smaller creator or if I hadn’t gone out of my way to find someone who knew someone from the news to tell my story, then I wouldn’t be able to. If I was physically very sick still, I wouldn’t be able to,” she says.

“Instagram has a lot to gain from me making content because I get millions and millions of views … which keeps people on their app, keeps them watching ads, it makes Instagram a lot of money. So it’s not like they’re just paying out of pocket or just paying out of generosity because they believe in my work. That’s work that I did, and I should be paid for and get my fair share of it. Otherwise, it’s just free labour.”

She adds that even after her dues are paid, she is unlikely to continue creating content on the platform in the same capacity she was thus far, even though social media is her main source of income.

“After this I feel like I don’t want to keep working on a platform so volatile and unsupportive of its creators.”

“Now, most of my audience is on TikTok — at least there, I can reach my followers in larger numbers even if I’m not getting paid,” she says. “It also seems that the bonus program is less rewarding than when I started since now getting the same amount of views pays out hundreds of dollars less.”

Nayyar also feels there should be more oversight for social media platforms to protect content creators.

“I think that a lot of these tech companies don’t really have like a dedicated body in government that is actually watching enough. The fact that there isn’t really any avenue for me to have justice or for me to have compensation or talk directly with them is a little bit scary,” she says.

She feels without any regulation, both content creators and consumers have no recourse to have grievances addressed.

“I feel like we need some dedicated people in government who actually study this. Because I feel like it’s a subject of its own. It’s very new, and it’s going unnoticed, and I think it needs to be checked before it’s too late.”