Here comes Silicon Valley: Meta’s dive into the NIL world

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is making its biggest investment yet in the NIL space, a signal that the Silicon Valley tech titans increasingly see an opportunity to substantially impact student-athletes in the fast-evolving NIL landscape.

In securing a three-year partnership with Durham, N.C.-based Teamworks, Meta is attempting to carve out a role to empower student-athletes as the next generation of content creators. Meta is providing athletes with NIL educational resources, including best practices on maximizing their social media earning potential, through INFLCR, a Teamworks company. INFLCR has more than 200 Division I college partners and works with a network of more than 70,000 active athlete users.

This likely is just the beginning of seeing Silicon Valley’s fingerprints on the NIL space. Much more is on the near-term horizon. And with Meta specifically, the tech giant views this as a two-way conversation with student-athletes, soliciting feedback to help its platforms continue to evolve to best suit the athlete. The overwhelming majority of those athletes will not play pro sports, meaning that their highest earning potential relative to monetizing their brand is likely during college.

“We believe our technologies are best-suited to really level that playing field for student-athletes and give everyone the same opportunity to monetize their Name, Image and Likeness in this new era,” Dev Sethi, Meta’s emerging athletes and sports creators lead, told On3. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re QB1 on Alabama or whether you’re the Wisconsin coxswain on their rowing team, in this era of NIL everyone has the ability, especially through social media, to build and monetize their brand. We feel a deep responsibility to serve this demographic.”

Industry sources say there remains a sizable education gap not only among athletes but also coaches and administrators regarding nuances of the NIL ecosystem, which is often littered with misinformation and embellishment. 

In practical terms, here’s how this partnership will directly benefit athletes looking to best leverage their Facebook and Instagram accounts to monetize their brands: By using the INFLCR app, they will be educated on monetizing tools that enable them to sell merchandise; where to link shopping carts on social posts; whether their account should be a creator or a business account; how to become verified; and what to do if your account is hacked. The educational resources are aimed to help athletes set up, protect and monetize Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Meta and INFLCR also will engage in joint in-person appearances at college campuses to educate athletes about the verification process, best social-media practices, monetization tips and content strategy. They also are available for coaches and administrators to help demystify what it means for student-athletes to monetize their brand through social media. 

“Since these are college athletes, most of whom don’t have an agent, we now are giving them a direct line to Facebook, a direct line to Instagram, to have conversations through the INFLCR app,” Jim Cavale, INFLCR’s founder and CEO, told On3. “And then on top of it, Instagram and Facebook, through this partnership, can run campaigns and initiatives to groups of student-athletes through INFLCR because they can use our Exchange to search and contact athletes with those initiatives.”

Meta has begun testing its Instagram subscription model with 10 creators, including two college athletes, UCLA gymnast Jordan Chiles and Oregon women’s basketball player Sedona Prince. Sethi said subscriptions are just one of many ways athletes can “choose their own adventure” in how they engage and monetize their fan bases. He said Meta soon will announce the next cohort of creators as the model scales to become one of its core monetization features on IG and Facebook.

Sethi said Prince initially reached out to her subscriber audience to ask fans how she should break the news publicly that she would be returning to Oregon next year. ”Think about the value of subscribing and being closer to your favorite student-athletes,” Sethi said. “I can think of no better example where Sedona’s picking up her phone, talking directly to her fans, developing a conversation about what will be one of the most seminal moments of her career on the playing court.”

And now with Meta’s commitment in the NIL space, the result should be student-athlete empowerment, with more athletes getting up to speed on how they can put money in their pockets by using their social media accounts as effective monetizing tools.