Instagram Tightens the Rules - Only Creators With 1K+ Followers Can Go Live
Adshine.pro08/02/202519 views
This one is unlikely to sit well with smaller creators on Instagram.
Over recent weeks, many users have reported seeing a new pop-up notification in their Instagram feed (spotted via Social Varsity):
Instagram has quietly raised the follower threshold for live-streaming, meaning accounts that haven’t reached a certain audience size will no longer be able to go live.
For many smaller creators who have relied on Instagram Live to connect with niche communities or run intimate broadcasts, this is a significant setback. Those with fewer than 1,000 followers will now have to resort to video calls instead—a feature that works for private conversations but offers none of the discovery potential that live-streaming provides.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, offered no explanation for the update when asked for comment. So we’re left to speculate on the reasoning behind it.
One possibility is cost. Live-streaming infrastructure is expensive, and Meta may have decided that it’s not worth the expense to host live streams that draw only a handful of viewers. There’s also the matter of misuse: bad actors can create new accounts, quickly promote them, and use live broadcasts to share prohibited content, knowing that if they get banned, they can simply start over. By requiring at least 1,000 followers, Instagram could be trying to make it harder for such abuse to occur.
Another factor could be quality control. By setting a follower threshold, Instagram is effectively ensuring that only creators with a baseline audience can stream, which could reduce low-quality or spammy live content. The thinking might be: if you have at least 1,000 followers, you’re less likely to misuse the tool—or at least, you’ve proven you have some level of legitimacy.
This shift also aligns Instagram more closely with live-streaming standards on other platforms. TikTok, for example, also requires 1,000 followers before an account can go live, while YouTube has its own thresholds, including a minimum of 50 subscribers for mobile live streaming. Given YouTube’s subscriber-to-viewer ratios, that barrier roughly mirrors Instagram’s new policy.
YouTube, for its part, recently raised its own minimum live-streaming age to 16, the same limit Instagram introduced back in April.
In short, there’s a wider trend emerging: platforms are tightening access to live-streaming tools, likely in response to content moderation, safety, and cost concerns.
