“Is anybody else seriously depressed that they’re getting rid of the Creator Fund?” TikToker @laurawiththecurls said in a video this week. “Was I ever making an earth-shattering amount of money on here? No. … But it was nice to get just a little bit of extra money monthly so that I could buy something for myself and not feel like I’m pulling from the monthly bills.”
Over the past week, many short-form creators on TikTok have been upset. Last Monday, TikTok suddenly announced it is shutting down its Creator Fund and is instead encouraging creators to apply for the “Creativity Program” — which is a lot like the Creator Fund, but only rewards content over one minute long. This is quite the snub for creators’ whose whole strategy revolves around TikTok’s culture of punchy, viral clips.
However, let’s be real. The Creator Fund … sucked. And although some people received a little supplemental income, it didn’t really help creators make a living. Back in 2022, creator Hank Green made an infamous viral video criticizing the fund for its meager payouts. TikToker SuperSaf, who has 652,500 followers on TikTok, replied to Green on Twitter, revealing that he only made about $137 U.S. dollars for 10 months on the creator fund.
Fortune soon reported that creators were getting paid “mere pennies” by the fund for their videos that accumulated hundreds of thousands to millions of views per month. Creators were required to have over 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views in the last 30 days to cash out, but other than that, the fund was incredibly opaque, and no one knew the metrics used to decide the payout each individual creator received. It was a fund that TikTok alleged was an investment of an initial $200 million, then raised to $1 billion, then to $2 billion across three years. But spread thin across numerous creators, most people received very little.
While some creators were getting a few bucks off it, the Creator Fund was never posed as a plan to give creators a clear cut of the revenue they helped generate — it was more designed from a PR perspective to sound like TikTok was launching a finite charity fund to “support” creators…
– Grace Stanley, Newsletter and Features Editor
In Today’s Newsletter
- From the Collapse of The Escapist, a Second Wind Rises
- Dance Moves: Creators’ Next Legal Risk or Revenue Stream?
- Actors’ Strike Ends: SAG-AFTRA Reaches Tentative ‘Historic’ Deal With AMPTP After Four Months
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Source: https://www.dailydot.com/passionfruit/passionfruit-newsletter-the-faux-charitable-endeavor-of-creator-funds/