The Creator Fund will be removed as of December 16, 2023.
TikTok, the popular short-form video app formerly known as musical.ly, has announced it’ll be removing its £1.6 billion Creator Fund by the end of the year. According to the BBC, the initiative, which has long been controversial among users, will be permanently replaced by the Creativity Program, which launched in the United States this past February.
The Creator Fund was launched in 2020 as a way for creators to make money for uploads, with TikTok at one point promising to pay out $1 billion USD over three years to users who uploaded successful videos – meaning they’d received at least 100,000 views within the past 30 days. It was only available in certain countries, and while touted as an income stream was said to pay out very little, even at millions of views.
This was a gripe Hank Green shared in a January 2022 video, titled So… TikTok Sucks. In the nearly 25-minute upload, he revealed that he made just 2.5 cents per 1,000 views on the app, despite having what many would consider a substantial following in the millions.
Hank went on to call the initiative a “static pool” and criticized the amount allotted to it, compared to how much ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, earns annually. He added that, if the app took the exact same approach as YouTube, in terms of ad revenue, then users could be making at least 16 cents per 1,000 views, allowing them to possibly pursue content creation full time.
As aforementioned, the Creativity Program was launched in the US this past February, with the criteria being that only uploads that are over a minute long are eligible for monetization. According to TikTok’s website, this give users “the potential to earn 20 times the amount previously offered by the Creator Fund.”
As of December 16, the Creator Fund will no longer be available in the US, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, with those in Italy and Spain remaining unaffected. Users in these select countries will have the option to roll over to the Creativity Program, so long as they’re over the age of 18, have at least 10,000 followers and have received 100,000 views in the past 30 days – similar to the prior initiative.
According to CBS, approximately half of all TikTok users spend their time watching videos that are more than a minute long, with the longest available being 30 minutes when uploaded via TikTok.com and 10 minutes when filmed directly on the app.
While this might be the case, it hasn’t stopped some creators from speaking out about the upcoming change, with a number commenting on related videos, saying their views have actually decreased after making the swap early.
As the Creativity Program continues to role out in more countries, TikTok will be looking for feedback from creators, with a spokesperson telling the BBC, “As we continue developing new ways to reward creators and enrich the TikTok experience, we value the feedback and direct insights from our community to help inform our decisions.”
Those eligible can join the Creativity Program by going to their settings and selecting Creator Tools. If you’re successful, you’ll be notified within three days.
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