Meta Is Restricting Some Pages to Two External Links Per Month Unless They Pay Up ⇥ pressgazette.co.uk

Meta:

Drive people directly to your website, shop or latest offer by adding a clickable link to your Instagram posts and reels. People can visit the website from your post or reel.

If you subscribe to a Meta One plan, you can add links to a set number of posts and reels each month based on your plan: […]

It seems utterly bananas to me that Meta is pitching links as a feature people need to pay for, but here we are.

Instagram has never supported links of any kind in individual posts, so that is a new feature with two links per month permitted for free, and more enabled by this pricey subscription — starting at $50 USD per month for four posts per month containing external links. But links in Reels have been commonplace for years. Meta is now gating that, too; and there is more.

Andrew Hutchinson, Social Media Today:

As outlined in the explainer, some accounts are now being limited to two link posts on Facebook per month, unless they pay for a Meta One subscription.

Charlotte Tobitt, Press Gazette:

Until now it has been unclear whether news publishers will come up against the link limit. But Press Gazette understands that news publishers are excluded – as they were from similar tests for the Meta Verified subscription (now folded into Meta One) that began at the end of last year.

However it has not been confirmed how Meta defines who falls into this category – and Press Gazette is aware of small publishers that have been told they hit the free link limit.

Meta seems to have two objectives here: to take a cut from businesses that use Meta’s services as a referral source more generally, and — more specifically — to capture some of the money made by influencers. There are people who post essentially one ad after another, without compensating Meta, as they have a personality that can carry a sales pitch. Those users are extremely dependent on their Instagram following for their own careers. I think Meta believes it can extract hundreds of dollars per month, at the highest end of Meta One’s tiers, from people who want to keep their referral code links.

Between this news and the expansion of Google A.I. features, it is extraordinary to see what were, in 2023, the two top referral sources make moves to become more insular.