How to earn money on Facebook

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Facebook is one of the platforms that pays creators directly rather than only hosting what they post. Meta operates several distinct routes, advertising against video and viewer tipping among them, and all of them run through the same account plumbing: a Page or professional account, a policy review, a verified way to be paid, and a country where the offer is switched on.

Three qualifications belong at the top, because they shape everything below. The offers have been merged and renamed repeatedly. What is available differs by territory. And whether any of it opens for you is decided by Meta's review, not by hitting a follower number.

What Meta pays for

Treat every programme name as a snapshot

Meta has combined some of these offerings, split others back apart, retired names that guides still cite, and rolled changes out to some countries well ahead of others. An article that hands you a definitive list of programme names is describing one moment in one market, and that includes this one.

The reliable answer is inside your own account. The Professional Dashboard shows the tools your Page is eligible for, the ones it is not yet eligible for, and what is missing in each case. If a route is not listed there, no amount of reading about it elsewhere makes it available, and if something unfamiliar is listed, that is Meta renaming rather than a new opportunity you missed.

What every route asks for

The specifics differ, but the gates are consistent enough to plan around:

• An eligible Page or professional account. Personal profiles posting to friends are not the unit Meta monetises.
• Compliance with the monetisation policies. Meta publishes two sets — Partner Monetisation Policies, which cover the account, and Content Monetisation Policies, which cover individual posts — and either can disqualify you.
• Availability where you are. Several routes remain unavailable in whole regions, which is not something a workaround solves.
• Content you actually made. Compilations of other people's clips are the category enforcement is aimed at.
• Review, and payout setup. A human or automated check plus tax and banking details Meta can verify before anything is sent.

If your dashboard offers you nothing yet

The sequence that helps is dull, which is why it gets skipped. Set up a Page instead of posting from a personal profile, because a profile can reach almost none of this. Post the sort of thing you intend to keep posting, since eligibility checks weigh a body of work rather than a single upload. Read both policy documents once, properly, while breaching them still costs you nothing. Then watch the status page in your account rather than reapplying — the usual reason a status changes is a route becoming available in your country, and no application speeds that up.

Reuploads are the quickest way to lose all of it

Posting somebody else's video fails on two fronts at once. Rights holders can claim material through Meta's own matching tools, and depending on what the claimant asked for the result may be a muted video, one blocked in certain countries, or a removal. Separately, Meta reduces the reach of accounts that mostly recycle other people's work and can remove their access to monetisation entirely, whether or not any single clip drew a complaint.

That is also this site's position, and it predates any monetisation question. A saved file does not carry a licence with it: downloading somebody's video does not make it yours, and if your own work is being redistributed, our copyright page sets out what can and cannot be acted on here. Building income on top of borrowed footage means building it on something a stranger can remove.

The routes that need no programme at all

These are worth listing separately because they work while you are waiting for eligibility, they work in countries where the programmes are absent, and none of them can be switched off by a policy update:

• Selling your own product or service. Consulting, repairs, lessons, tickets, a physical product. Facebook becomes the shop window rather than the payer, and nobody can withdraw your eligibility for it.
• Marketplace and shops. For anything with stock, listing where buyers are already searching removes the need for reach entirely.
• Lead generation for an off-platform business. A trade business posting finished jobs is running a portfolio, not a channel. The money arrives as bookings.
• Affiliate arrangements. Permitted where the programme you joined allows social posting, and only ever with the relationship declared. An undeclared affiliate link is a problem in most jurisdictions before it is a problem with Meta.
• Reusing your own footage. Your uploads are also a portfolio and a showreel. Saving your own published video keeps a copy you control.

On that last one: Facebook's own interface will not hand you a file of your own upload, so if you need the video itself for a portfolio, a client or an archive, saving it from its public link is the practical route. Your own material is the one case where nothing about permission is ambiguous.

Disclosure is a legal question, not a courtesy

A paid post has to be identifiable as paid, and the obligation lands on whoever published it rather than on the brand that funded it. Regulators in the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union each enforce a version of this, and none of them accepts that a platform label existed but went unused. Use the paid-partnership tooling where Facebook offers it, and say it in the copy too, in words an ordinary reader takes at face value.

Affiliate links carry the same duty. If a click earns you a commission, that belongs in the post rather than buried somewhere a reader has to go hunting for it. Meta's branded content rules sit alongside the monetisation policies, so an undisclosed arrangement can cost you the deal and your eligibility in the same week.

Where to look for numbers instead

Two places, both of which will disappoint anyone hoping for a rate card. The dashboard inside your account produces estimates based on what your posts have actually done, which is the only figure connected to your audience and your country. Meta's help pages and its creator site carry the terms, the eligibility conditions and the payment thresholds, and are updated when those change.

Anything else is someone's screenshot. Earnings on a platform this large vary by an order of magnitude between countries for identical view counts, because what an advertiser pays to reach an audience is what ultimately funds the payment. A figure quoted without a country attached is not a figure.

Eligibility is not permanent

Access can be paused or withdrawn after the fact — for a policy breach, for a pattern of unoriginal posting, or after a review you did not know was happening. Sometimes the notice arrives with a specific reason and sometimes it is generic, which is frustrating and is nonetheless the process.

Appeals go through Meta. There is no relationship between this site and Meta, no channel into its review teams, and nothing here that could be restored even in principle — what we are is a downloader run by people with no standing in your case. The form inside your own account is the route, and the account that lost access is the only one that can use it. Keeping copies of what you publish is the part you control, and it costs nothing to do it as you go.

Related reading: what the Watch surface is, since it is where most monetised video ends up, and what a saved clip may and may not be used for.