TikTok is shutting down the $1 billion fund it’s been using to pay creators since 2020.
Beginning Dec. 16, 2023, creators in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and France will no longer receive payouts from the fund. Per The Verge, creators in Italy and Spain will apparently continue to receive payouts, though we’re not sure how long that will continue.
This shutdown isn’t unexpected; the creator fund was only intended to be a three-year program, and in those three years, its fatal flaw has become more and more pronounced. TikTok launched it as a static pool of money—$1 billion. $200 million of that was earmarked for U.S. creators, which means that over the last three years, TikTok has had around $550,000 per day to divvy up between all U.S. creators combined.
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So, as more stateside creators made more high-quality content and were approved for the fund, the amount they made per view was actually going down, because there were more creators with same $550,000 per day to go around.
(Hank Green talked about this a lot last year. You should check out our writeups here and here.)
Basically, it’s been clear there were issues, and that creators on TikTok were making mere pennies. Green himself disclosed he was making 2.5 cents per 1,000 views. Over on YouTube, the generally accepted CPM is $7 per 1,000 views–though that’s on long-form; YouTube’s not doing so hot paying out short-form views either.
If you’re wondering whether TikTok is going to continue paying out creators, the answer is yes–and no. It’s already introduced the creator fund’s successor: the Creativity Program, which doesn’t appear to pay out from a stagnant pool of money, and which TikTok has said judges payouts based on views and other engagement metrics.
The catch is, the Creativity Program only pays out on videos that are longer than one minute. If you’re publishing vids under 60 seconds, you’re not going to get paid.
A TikTok spokesperson told The Verge creators can expect to earn 20 times more from the Creativity Program than they did the creator fund.
The Creativity Program is open to creators in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, and Korea who are 18+ years old and have at least 10,000 followers and at least 100,000 views over the past 30 days. TikTok says creators who were part of the creator fund will be grandfathered into the program.
