TikTok Discontinues its $1B Monetization Fund

• TikTok will terminate its creator fund on December 16, 2023.
• Creators have expressed dissatisfaction with the small payments from the fund.
• TikTok has launched the Creativity Program as an alternative income source.

TikTok announced today that it will terminate its $1 billion creator fund on December 16th, 2023.

TikTok creators in the US, UK, Germany, and France will lose their ability to earn money from the original fund, as stated by TikTok spokesperson Maria Jung. However, content creators in Italy and Spain will not be impacted.

The creator fund was introduced in 2020 with a promise to distribute $1 billion over three years to those creating viral content on the platform. Nevertheless, influencers and content creators have frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the small payments, sometimes as low as a few dollars, even with millions of views.

As a result, it has become extremely challenging to earn a consistent income solely from the creator fund, and TikTok has not issued an official statement in response to this issue.

In February of this year, TikTok launched the Creativity Program as an alternative income source on the platform. This initiative offered increased payouts but necessitated content to be longer than the platform’s original short-form content format. Unlike the initial fund, which distributed earnings from a collective pool, the Creativity Program determined monetization based on views and engagement, resembling the approach used by YouTube.

Since the introduction of the Creativity Program, TikTok has actively recruited new content creators to join the platform. According to Jung, these creators have reported earning up to 20 times more than what was possible through the original fund.

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The closure of TikTok‘s original fund was anticipated, given its pre-planned three-year duration with a set budget allocation. Content creators in the US, UK, Germany, and France who are presently part of the fund will be offered the opportunity to shift to the Creativity Program.