On November 6, TikTok announced that it will sunset the $2 billion Creator Fund, which was established in 2020 to pay creators on the platform for viral videos. Starting December 16, if creators wish to be compensated directly by TikTok, they will need to enroll in the Creativity Fund, which only pays creators for videos longer than 60 seconds—the equivalent of long-form for many on the platform. For creators interviewed by Fortune, the end of the Creator Fund validates their fears that the platform does not truly value their short-form content, and that the longevity of careers in social content creation remains uncertain.
“I'm always anxious about being a professional creator long-term, just because there's really no line of sight into what the future holds,” says Alexa Santos, a Fort Lauderdale–based food and recipe social creator, who runs TikTok account @alexawhatsfordinner, which has over 16 million likes. She believes her viral recipe videos are best between 15 to 20 seconds in length, but is forcing herself to stretch them to 60-plus seconds for eligibility in TikTok’s Creativity Fund, as it’s now a primary way for creators to get compensated by the platform outside of live-streaming and shopping. “It's always stressful when things change on us; you have to change what you're doing and alternate how you're creating content.”
When TikTok launched the Creator Fund in July of 2020 with $200 million, the company said it aimed to “support ambitious creators who are seeking opportunities to foster a livelihood through their innovative content.” Though the company increased the funding to $2 billion in the following years, creators would largely argue that TikTok’s ambition was unmet. Even creators who garnered millions of monthly views said the Fund paid paltry sums. “It became very clear early on that I was not gonna make a living off the Creator Fund,” says sketch comedian Pat Beutow (@nomdecoom on TikTok) who was part of the Creator Fund from the spring of 2021 until recently. During that time, he says his videos generated an average of 2 million views per month, but he made “a couple hundred bucks” in total. “It's our tech overlords; they can cut it off at any point if they want.”
The eligibility for acceptance into the Creator and Creativity funds remain identical: TikTokers need over 10,000 followers and more than 100,000 video views in the last 30 days. A TikTok spokesperson told Fortune that all members of the Creator Fund will automatically be accepted into the Creativity Fund, though they need to transfer voluntarily.
Since she joined the Creator Fund about two years ago, Azure MacCannell, known for her cleaning hack videos as @livecomposed, has generated $6,328 from the Creator Fund, amounting to around $100 per month for the millions of views she generates per month. “When I started [in the Creator Fund], I remember thinking, Oh, this is something I can make money on,” says MacCannell. “But as I’ve grown in my content creating career, I realize that [the Creator Fund] is not enough incentive to show up and keep creating content all the time.” These days MacCannell mostly uses TikTok for posting videos she makes for various brands, her primary source of income. Her organic content fares better on other social platforms.
Another one bites the dust
The TikTok Creator Fund’s death is yet another headstone in the cemetery of programs launched—and ended—by the social giants to compensate creators. Earlier this year Meta abruptly ended its Reels Bonus program, and it is remodeling its ad revenue share program; both were launched to compensate creators for short-form video content. TikTok also quietly killed its ad-revenue-share program Pulse after Fortune wrote about it paying mere pennies to creators.
Meanwhile, YouTube and Snapchat have doubled down on paying creators. YouTube Shorts Partner Program is a direct play to incentivize disenchanted TikTokers like MacCannell and Santos to create content for the Google-owned video site, and it’s going fairly well. Snapchat has also made a play to capture time and content from top creators like the D’Amelio sisters and David Dobrik with its “insane” monetization program that has paid some creators upwards of $10,000 for a couple of days of posts, reports Fortune.
Still, TikTok is regarded among creators as the best platform to find viral success. And creators tell Fortune that the Creativity Fund, its initiative to compensate creators for videos over 60 seconds, is paying out meaningful sums. It's not clear why the payouts for longer videos are so different than those for short videos have been, though some creators suspect it's related to TikTok's ambition to escalate competition with YouTube. “It has been a helpful chunk of change—for the first time—as of the last two or three months,” says comedy creator Beutow. “But because of the inconsistency of the algorithm, it’s not enough to say, ‘Oh, I don’t need other methods of income.’”
The ever-changing payment schemes by the platforms, fickle algorithms, and unpredictable trends may mean that being a full-time content creator is harder than ever. Even for creators who are amassing hundreds of millions of views per month, the long-term viability of life (and death) by virality remains financially unpredictable.
Most full-time creators—Beutow, Santos, and MacCannell included—rely on brand deals to stay afloat. “For me and the majority of my creator friends, having the brand partnerships is the only way that we're able to make a legit living off [creating] versus just scraping together crumbs of Creator Fund this or bonuses that,” says Santos.
