Meta paid creators nearly $3bn — and the hunt for AI slop started the same day
Six consecutive years of growth: $800m in 2020 and nearly three billion now, up 35% year on year. At the same time LinkedIn shipped a 'looks like AI slop' button, after research found 41% of long posts there are fully generated.
WHITE CHRONICLE
Payouts up for a sixth year
- $800m in 2020 → $1.1bn → $1.4bn → $1.7bn → $2.0bn → nearly $3bn now. Up 35% over the last year.
- The number of creators earning over $10,000 a year grew 30%.
To everyone who has been burying Facebook monetization since 2021, the chart answers in one gesture: the line only goes up. The platform pays more because creator content drives engagement, and engagement sells ads — the interests align.
NUMBER OF THE DAY
PAID OUT FOR 2025
A record for the whole history of the programme, and not a one-off spike
$3bn
This is not a temporary bonus programme waiting to be quietly wound down. Six consecutive years of growth is a budget, not a campaign.BLACK CHRONICLE
Trust erosion runs across the whole internet
- Pangram Labs research: 41% of long LinkedIn posts are fully generated, and almost 30% of short ones.
- The platform answered with a button that hides flagged posts.
- 23.9% of long posts on X and one in five on Substack are also flagged as machine-written.
Facebook will not stay out of it. The line does not run between AI and humans — it runs between unsupervised AI and an actual system.
And the practical item from the same day: saves matter more than likes. 108 saves on 3,337 views is 3.2% of the audience. A like means “saw it, approved”. A save means “I will come back to this”. The second signal weighs more, and content with a high save rate gets distributed as a useful resource rather than entertainment.