TikTok has announced that it will end its widely criticized Creator Fund next month. Initially launched in 2020, the $2 billion creator fund will be discontinued in the United States, Germany, and France on December 16, according to Fortune.
The short-form video platform's initial plan was to pay out $1 billion over a three-year period to creators for the content they produced. The fund was made with the intention of compensating users in exchange for creating viral videos.
Program-qualified users had to be at least 18 years old, have 10,000 authentic followers, and a minimum view count of 100,000 across created videos within 30 days prior to applying. The requirements did not seem too steep, but users soon discovered how little the payout was.
TikTok Receives Backlash From its Own Community
TikTok creator Mason Murdock created a 47-second video in 2022 explaining how much money he made under the Creator Fund. Shockingly, with 21.6 million views, Murdock made a measly $340. Other creators with a huge following, like Mr. Beast and Hank Green, have also criticized how small the fund payout seems to be.
Mr. Beast provided a screenshot of his fund dashboard showing a total earning of $14,910, which seems a reasonable amount. But against the view count of the video of "over a billion views," it reveals the skewed view-to-payout ratio.
In fact, in Green's 2022 YouTube video, titled "So...TikTok Sucks," he talked about how he only earned around $0.02 and $0.03 for every thousand views on TikTok despite being a "giant" in the platform with over 6.3 million TikTok followers.
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What Is TikTok's New Creativity Program?
TikTok will reportedly replace the creator fund with its newer creativity program. In response to the complaints about the fund, TikTok announced earlier this year that its Creativity Program would be the answer to the small payout issue.
In its beta stage, the program is already receiving good feedback from initial testers. NBC News reported that the new program will be available for eligible Creator Fund beneficiaries and will be up to 20 times more profitable.
The trade-off, however, is that the Creativity Program will reserve payout only for videos that are at least a minute long and have a minimum of 1,000 views.
With this move, many users are expected to move away from creating the short-form videos that TikTok became famous for and pivot to the more lucrative option of creating longer content.
