TikTok plans to tell creators on its platform that it will discontinue the Creator Fund, the ByteDance-owned company’s $2 billion initiative to pay viral stars. The service plans to announce later today that it will discontinue the three-year-old fund on Dec. 16 in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany.
The Creator Fund has been controversial among creators and regulators since it launched because it largely failed to meaningfully pay creators. It also stored data for content creators in the program on servers in China, according to Forbes, which is contrary to the company's previous promises that it stored all U.S. user data within the U.S.
“Our ultimate goal is to create the best experience possible on TikTok and provide a robust ecosystem of monetization offerings to creators,” a TikTok representative told Fortune via email today about the Creator Fund's shuttering. “Part of our efforts and ongoing commitment to provide requires us to evolve products and apply resources elsewhere to best support creators and explore new offerings.”
Creators previously told Fortune that they were paid “mere pennies” by the Creator Fund for TikTok videos that garnered hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of views per month. In order to have been eligible for the fund, creators needed over 10,000 followers and over 100,000 video views in the last 30 days.
TikTok launched a separate program to pay creators for viral content called the Creativity Program earlier this year to incentivize creators with a similar reach to publish longer-form video with monetary bonuses for viral videos over 60 seconds long. The program’s members told Fortune in July that they were making “thousands of dollars” monthly from the program.
This followed the company introducing its Pulse ad revenue share program last winter that, like the Creator Fund, paid creators amounts below $5 for millions of views, according to Fortune. It appears that TikTok may have quietly discontinued this program as revenue share is not mentioned in the Pulse section of TikTok’s Business Help Center. (A representative for TikTok did not respond in time to Fortune’s query about the state of the program or where Creativity Fund members' data is stored.)
Now, as the Creator Fund ends, its members can shift to the Creativity Program by changing their settings on the app for automatic approval.
But longer-form remains king: Creators cannot be compensated by the Creativity Fund for videos under 60 seconds. This is likely a play to drum up more ad dollars as it incentivizes higher-quality content and more engaged viewers.
Whether creators who migrate to the Creativity Program will receive negligible payments (as they did with the Creator Fund) or the windfalls they experienced in the early days of the program remains to be seen.
