TikTok will soon be PAY-to-WATCH!

A few days before I wrote this, many TikTok creators have announced that they have lost the feature that enables users to create videos up to 10 minutes long.

Upon discovering this, I checked if I, too, lost the feature and yes, I did. So, I did some digging to find out why this was happening to seemingly everyone on the platform and I eventually landed on an article from March 9, 2023.

Long story short, TikTok and YouTube have been competing ever since YouTube released “Shorts” which is their version of a TikTok video. Shorts was eventually monetized in order to attract creators and now TikTok wants to do the same to pull users back onto their platform.

How will TikTok allow creators to monetize videos? By releasing a new feature called “Series“, which enables TikTokers to form a collection of premium content inclusive of 80 videos max., with each video being 20 minutes max. Then, they get to put a price on this “Series” between 99 American cents to almost $190, which (if my calculations are correct) is about ₱50 to over ₱10,400.

Creators will be able to keep 100% of their earnings (minus platform and processing fees) for a “limited time”, says Tiktok, though it’s not clear when TikTok will take a cut of the revenue and what the revenue share split will be.

For the Shorts program, YouTube allocates 45% of ad revenue from Shorts videos for creators; of that 45%, the amount that users are paid will be determined by the total number of Shorts views every 30 days. For longer, traditional YouTube videos, 55% of ad revenue goes to the creator, while the remaining 45% goes to YouTube.

For now, “Series” is only available to a select group of creators, though TikTok may extend applications to more creators in the coming months.