TikTok has some ‘bad news’ for creators

TikTok

has announced that it will be shutting down its

Creator Fund

, which was launched in 2020 to financially support creators on the app.
Creators in the US,

UK

,

Germany

, and

France

can no longer monetize their content through the original fund, but

TikTokers

in Italy and Spain are not affected by this change, according to a TikTok spokesperson Maria Jung.

The fund will be discontinued on December 16 in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
TikTok says that its ultimate goal is to provide the best experience possible for users while also offering creators a range of monetization options. The company has decided to shut down the Creator Fund to focus its resources on developing new products and services that better support creators and improve the overall user experience.

The Creator Program, launched in 2020, pays creators for viral content and incentivises them to publish longer-form videos. A fund worth $1 billion was announced in 2020 to pay creators for their videos with hundreds of thousands or millions of views. The fund is aimed at micro-influencers who have at least 10K followers and 100K views in the last 30 days. However, creators have complained about low payouts, earning “mere pennies.”

TikTok introduced another payment program for creators, the Creativity Program, earlier this year to incentivize creators for their viral content. The program is designed to encourage creators with a similar reach to produce longer-form videos and rewards them with monetary bonuses for videos that go viral and are over 60 seconds long.
TikTok creators can still earn from the Creativity Program
With the Creator Fund coming to an end, program members can switch to the Creativity Program by adjusting their in-app settings for automatic approval. Some who have been part of the program had reported earning “thousands of dollars” every month, according to a report by Fortune in July. However, the Creativity Program only compensates creators for videos that are over 60 seconds long.
Last year, the company also introduced its

Pulse program

that shared ad revenue with creators. However, it seems that TikTok may have silently stopped this program, as revenue sharing is not mentioned in the Pulse section of TikTok’s Business Help Center.