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Instagram gives you five bio links and a Story sticker. A Reel gets nothing.
Those are the only two link surfaces Meta documents. The caption is not one of them.
Checked August 2026
Every claim links to its source. These rules change without warning.
How Instagram pays creators
Five tools, all needing a professional account and an age of 18 or over.4
- Gifts, the Stars on Reels. 500 followers. Not five thousand, the figure most guides print
- Subscriptions. 10,000 followers
- Badges on Live. No published follower minimum. Meta's revenue share is "currently at 0%", capped at USD 250 per supporter
- Creator Marketplace, for brand deals. The only stated bar is "maintaining a sufficient follower base"
- Bonuses. Below
Badges, gifts and subscriptions are all live. If you have read that they were withdrawn, that is wrong.
Bonuses are the ones that come and go
Instagram says so in advance: bonuses are "by invitation only for a limited time", and "as we test and learn, we may end bonus programmes".5 Reels Play is no longer documented anywhere. The Performance bonus is "no longer active". Breakthrough stopped accepting applications on 26 February 2026.
Meta's bonus article contradicts itself on eligible countries: the prose names three, the table several more. Check your own account.
Nothing on that list is available at 40 followers. A tracked link in your bio is.
Where a link can actually go
Two link surfaces, and no others. Where Meta publishes nothing, this table says so instead of guessing.
| Placement | Verdict | So do this |
|---|---|---|
| Bio links | Clickable | Up to five, visible to anyone on or off Instagram, with no follower or account-type requirement. Put a tracked link here first: it is the only placement live for every account that does not expire after a day. 1 |
| Story link sticker | Clickable | The one that sits over the media itself. The old limit to verified or high-follower accounts was removed in 2021: Instagram announced it was "expanding the ability to add links in Stories to all accounts". Label a second tracked link for it, so a Story is separable from your bio. 2 |
| Any clickable overlay on a Reel | Not clickable | There is not one. Meta's sticker documentation says link stickers "can only be used in organic Instagram Stories", and the sticker index warns that not all stickers are available for Reels. Post the Reel, then put the link in a Story and keep one in your bio. 3 |
| Feed and Reel captions | Not documented | Instagram publishes nothing about whether a URL in a caption is clickable. Treat the caption as text and use it to point at the bio. 1 |
| Comments | Not documented | Undocumented too. Say where the link is in a pinned comment. Do not put it there. 1 |
Instagram's help articles are device-gated and render only in a real browser, so these were read in one.
Two placements, two labels.
Your bio link works all month. A Story sticker works for a day. Averaged together they tell you nothing.
Both point at the same page. The code on the end is what tells them apart, and on Instagram it is the only thing that can: the Instagram in-app browser sends no referrer at all. How the tracking works.
What the report then tells you
Every email address and every payment is counted against the placement it arrived from.
By placement on Instagram
Example| Placement | Visits | Emails | Payments | Earned |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IG Story sticker | 486 | 41 | 9 | $118 |
| IG bio | 690 | 22 | 4 | $47 |
The Story sticker ran for one day and brought in nearly twice the email addresses your bio did all month.
Instagram will not give you their email addresses.
Instagram gives you a follower count, insights, and the ability to post and DM. It does not give you your followers' email addresses, and there is no export that produces them.
Five bio slots is more than most platforms give you, and none of them can take an email address or a payment. Your Linkonz page carries up to ten links of its own, with a sign-up form and a payment block above them. We take 0%.
Addresses come from the form on your page and from the opt-in link on a payment receipt, and export as a CSV. How the capture and the consent record work. The free plan collects without limit and shows you the first five.
* Stripe's card fee still applies.
Sources
- Instagram: add websites to your profile. help.instagram.com
- Instagram: expanding links in Stories to everyone (2021). about.instagram.com
- Instagram: about the link sticker for Stories. help.instagram.com
- Instagram: monetization tools and eligibility. help.instagram.com
- Instagram: about bonuses. help.instagram.com