Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes a swipe at Apple and says Facebook is reducing its subscription fees to help creators earn more money

• Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will provide more ways for creators to earn money and build a following on Facebook.
• Facebook's subscription service, which launched last June, provides a revenue stream for people to support creators on the platform.
• Zuckerberg's post also comes amid tension with Apple, which installed privacy measures to hinder user data tracking from companies like Meta.

Meta is updating its guidelines to help creators make more money from subscriptions.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Facebook post on Wednesday that the company will make several new changes to its subscriptions feature in an effort to better support creators. The post also took a swipe at Apple's existing taxes placed on Facebook's in-app transactions, an ongoing point of contention between the two companies.

"We're focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "The 30% fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we're updating our Subscriptions product so now creators can earn more."

Facebook introduced its subscriptions service in June 2020, which allows creators to collect monthly-recurring payments from audiences on the platform, in an attempt to provide a "sustainable income," according to a Facebook spokesperson.

The update comes as Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook – continues to build out its virtual reality capabilities and determine how a creator marketplace can fit into that picture. The company announced its rebrand last week as a way to redirect its focus on building a "metaverse," a virtual space for users to interact with each other.

Meta's announcement also follows an ongoing privacy battle with Apple, which released an update to its devices earlier this year allowing users to opt-in or opt-out of third-party data tracking, negatively impacting the ad models of companies like Meta and Google. As a result, Facebook filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple earlier this year.

Meta says it will launch a custom-made promotional link through its Creator Studio for creators to use. People who subscribe using the link will be directed to another website to make a subscriptions purchase using Facebook Pay, and creators will get to keep all the money they earn from that transaction, excluding taxes.

Creators can forfeit up to 15-30% of their earnings to companies like Apple whenever people purchase subscriptions within the Facebook apps on mobile devices, a Meta spokesperson told Insider.

Facebook will also pay creators a bonus of $5-20 for every new subscriber they get through the end of the year as part of the company's $1 billion investment in creators it made earlier this year. According to a Facebook blog post, the feature is currently invite-only in markets where the subscription feature is available to creators, though the company says it plans to expand the bonus program in the coming months.

The platform will also roll out several new creator tools, like an "estimated earnings breakdown" within subscriptions to track their subscriptions payouts and the fees they have to pay, as well as a way for creators to download new subscriber emails.