TikTok restructures Creator Fund, shifting payouts to watch-time

TikTok on Friday announced a sweeping restructure of its Creator Fund, replacing the flat per-view rate with a watch-time-weighted payout model that the company said will reward retention over raw reach. The change, effective May 1, is the most substantial overhaul of the program since its 2020 launch.

Under the new formula, creators are paid based on the cumulative minutes watched across their qualifying videos rather than the total view count. TikTok said in a blog post that the shift addresses longstanding criticism from top creators who argued the old system undervalued long-form content and effectively penalized creators who made videos longer than the platform's sub-30-second sweet spot. A flat per-view rate had rewarded viral short clips regardless of whether viewers watched them through to the end.

The company has also restructured eligibility. To qualify for the new Creator Fund, accounts must have at least 10,000 followers, be at least 18 years old, have logged more than 100,000 video views in the preceding 30 days, and — new in this pass — maintain a minimum aggregate watch-time-per-view score that TikTok has declined to publish. Company representatives said the threshold is calibrated to filter out accounts that lean heavily on bot traffic or incentivized view-farming.

The change comes as TikTok faces mounting pressure from regulators in the United States and Europe, and as rival platforms have ramped up their own creator-monetization efforts. Instagram Reels overhauled its bonus program twice in 2025 before quietly winding it down for most creators; YouTube Shorts launched its own minimum-CPM pilot this month. "We heard loud and clear that creators wanted a model that better reflects the work that goes into each video," a TikTok spokesperson said in the announcement. "This is a response to that feedback, and we expect to keep iterating."

Creator reaction has been mixed. Some long-form-leaning accounts have welcomed the shift — several creators in the 500k-to-2M follower range told HowSociable they expect their effective payouts to roughly double under the new formula. Short-form-first accounts, particularly those leaning on meme content and trend-riding, have pushed back publicly, arguing the change punishes the exact format TikTok was built on. "This is Instagram-ifying TikTok," wrote one top creator in a widely-shared post.

The restructure will affect more than 2 million creators in the Fund globally, according to TikTok's internal numbers. The company did not disclose whether the total pool of payouts would increase, remain flat, or contract — and multiple creator-economy analysts told HowSociable they expect the absence of that disclosure to become the biggest unanswered question of the rollout. "If the pool is flat and the rules are just shifting who gets paid, that's a zero-sum game," said Priya Venkatesh, a creator-economy analyst at Kajabi. "We'll know by the end of May based on aggregate creator earnings."

The rollout begins May 1 for US creators, expands to the EU on May 15, and reaches the remaining Fund markets by mid-June. Creators currently in the program will see their first payout under the new formula in their early-June statement.