Meta has announced a month-long “Stars Fest” on Facebook lasting until December 31. The new event brings the ability to give your favourite creator ‘stars’ on their post, potentially doubling the creators’ earnings. Additionally, Meta is also announcing several other star-related features.

Meta will be testing stars in different places in the coming month, including videos on your News Feed, the Watch Feed and the Gaming tab, with plans to bring the feature to Instagram’s Reels next year. 

These stars initially began to show creators the audiences’ appreciation during live videos but since then have expanded on to recorded videos as well. According to their Stars Fest announcement, Meta’s vision for stars is to “become the best way people show their appreciation on Facebook.”

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, has spent this year experimenting with new ways to monetise their many different channels, including their Live Audio Rooms and Podcasts, as well as announcing rewards for creators on Instagram which also revolved around stars.

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Meta’s month-long starry night

Along with the ability to hand out stars in the places mentioned above, Meta is also launching a Stars store — a website where users can use Facebook Pay to buy stars. They can then hand out to eligible creators on Facebook Live or on-demand videos. 

Before the launch of this store, stars could only be purchased when watching videos. The Stars store makes the whole star buying experience more cohesive by letting users buy stars in packages, much like most other in-app purchases or microtransactions that we’ve seen in mobile games and deposit them in a virtual wallet.

Another feature called “Stars Party” is also being launched alongside. A “Stars Party” will be triggered when a certain number of people have sent stars during a live stream, and once triggered, it’ll have a countdown timer of five minutes to let the community hit a Stars goal together.

If the goal is met, community members are greeted with a star-spangled “Thank You” message on the chat screen. Additionally, for every completed Star Party between December 22 and January 3, creators will receive a $50 bonus.

To differentiate top star senders from the rest of the audience, Star badges are now also available. These badges are divided into tiers depending upon how many Stars a particular user has sent to a specific creator. Lastly, there’s a Stars leaderboard, which shows the weekly top Stars senders for each creator with additional leaderboard categories coming in the future, including top monthly senders and top all-time Stars senders.

Lastly, as part of their $1 billion investment in creators, the company is also launching a Stars Double bonus. This means that through March 31, Meta will compensate certain creators’ stars, earning up to $750 per month. Overall, creators can earn up to $3750 in just bonus payments. Keep in mind that this is an invite-only program and will be available in all markets where Stars are available.

The company is also planning on distributing $3 million in Stars to its user to give away to their favourite creators. These free stars will show up as an invitation while watching a creator’s live video and can be sent immediately or after adding a personalised comment. 

You can check out the entire Star Fest schedule here

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