TikTok to end $1 billion creator fund which pays users for making viral videos - but there is a new one

TikTok’s $1 billion (around 814,7810,000) creator fund, which pays users for creating videos, will come to an end later this year, it has been announced.

Creators in the UK, US, Germany, and France will no longer be able to monetize their content through the original fund, said TikTok spokesperson Maria Jung, but TikTokers in Italy and Spain aren’t affected by the change. The creator fund was originally introduced in 2020, with the company promising to pay out the $1bn over three years to people who were making viral content on the app.

It has therefore come as no surprise that the fund will close by the end of the year, as this marks three years since the fund was launched. The app will formally shut down the fund, which pays creators who have at least 10,000 followers and have had at least 100,000 views on their videos in the last 30 days, on Saturday December 16, according to a report in Fortune.

A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement to TIME that the company is committed to creating "the best experience possible on TikTok and provide a robust ecosystem of monetization offerings to creators." They added: "Part of our efforts and ongoing commitment to provide requires us to evolve products and apply resources elsewhere to support creators best and explore new offerings."

The fund has not been without its issues, however. Over the course of the last three years, influencers and other content creators have said they have received low payouts, sometimes just a few dollars for millions of views, which made it impossible to earn a living through the creator fund alone. It is not known if TikTok has paid out all of the $1bn.

In February of this year, the platform introduced a new monetization method that it said would result in higher payouts for popular creators: the Creativity Program. Unlike the original fund, the Creativity Program requires creators to make videos longer than one minute, which is a notable difference for an app which began as a place to share short form clips.

TikTok said earnings would be based on views and other engagement metrics, instead of publicising a pot of money from which payments come out of. Since the launch of the new system, TikTok has been inviting eligible creators to switch over to the Creativity Program and, according to Jung, creators can earn 20 times the amount they were making under the original fund. The long-form program therefore seems to be more promising than the original short form one, with creators telling Fortune they have been making “thousands of dollars" from it.