TikTok is making moves to become the most lucrative video platform for creators.
The company announced its new endeavour this week called TikTok Pulse— an advertising-revenue share program for creators and publishers with at least 100,000 followers. The program will allow advertisers to buy ad space on the top 4% of videos on the platform from a variety of different categories including beauty, fashion, gaming, cooking, and more.
The program will roll out to the U.S. market in June, Variety reports.
While revenue-share programs exist on competing video platforms, it’s no secret that creators have been burned by this model in the past.
In 2017, YouTube faced a massive blow to its revenue-share program, now dubbed “adpocalypse“.
Following a series of controversial videos by some of the platform’s biggest creators and concerns regarding improper children’s content, advertisers withdrew their spend with YouTube en-masse, forcing the company to prioritise family-friendly channels and implement strict monetisation requirements via an opt-in partner program. These changes resulted in a sharp and significant decline in ad revenue for creators across the platform, with many scaling back their content output as they could no longer support themselves as a full-time YouTube creator.
To get ahead of similar issues that could arise, Sofia Hernandez, TikTok global head of business marketing, said the company is taking several precautions to ensure the ad campaigns will be brand-safe, including an “inventory filter” which will screen ads before being pushed through.
With the rollout of this creator revenue-share program and the app’s shift to 10-minute videos earlier this year, TikTok is really coming for YouTube’s neck.