Report: 65% of creators believe a TikTok ban would hurt their bottom line

An annual survey of more than 1,500 respondents has revealed the moneymaking strategies creators are relying on in 2024. More than half of the surveyed individuals are worried that a TikTok ban could affect their financial prospects, and those fears have led to an overall revenue shift from TikTok to YouTube.

These insights come from the 2024 Future of the Creator Economy Report, a data set provided by Epidemic Sound. The leading source for fully-licensed background music initially queried 1,500 creators for its report, but it went back and talked to “a different sample of 1,000 content creators who are currently monetizing their content” after the possibility of a U.S. TikTok ban came into view.

Among the surveyed creators, Epidemic Sound recorded a noticeable trend: Creator dollars are leaving TikTok. In last year’s Future of the Creator Economy Report, 30% of respondents said that the ByteDance-owned app was their top platform for income generation. This year, that figure is down to 18.3%. Creator satisfaction with X is down as well. Thanks in large part to the unpredictable whims of Elon Musk, only 6.3% of respondents chose the platform formerly known as Twitter as their top revenue source.

For some of the creators who are lessening investments in TikTok and X, YouTube and Instagram have become the preferred revenue generators. Both of those platforms appealed to a larger percentage of creators than they did in Epidemic Sound’s 2023 report.

Current events can provide a partial rationale for the creators who are losing faith in TikTok. As the app is fighting to avoid a forced divestiture or U.S. ban, some of its users are seeing the writing on the wall — while others are defending TikTok against the Biden administration’s new regulations. 65% of the respondents in the Epidemic Sound study expressed concerns that they would struggle to monetize their content if TikTok were to be banned. Meanwhile, 49% of respondents have started expanding on platforms other than TikTok.

In addition to its buzz about the TikTok ban, the Epidemic Sound report also contains dozens of additional details related to AI (creator adoption is down year-over-year across the board), monetization challenges (53.6% of respondents are worried about their limited reach), and dozens of topics in between. You can sort out all of the details here.