TikTok creators mourn app where “overnight” success is possible

For online sensation Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform for educating her 11 million followers about her life’s passion: bees.

The loss of the platform in the US – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld a ban due to be passed next week – will be “substantial” financially for Ms Thompson, a beekeeper from Texas, but it is also the loss of an educational tool.

“There are a lot of other people on the platform who offer educational content or informative content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss, and that’s what needs to be focused on, beyond the economic aspect, is the loss that we as a society – the people who use TikTok – will certainly feel.”

About 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless its China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or intervention comes from the executive branch, the platform is set to go dark in the US on Sunday.

The social media giant’s fate was left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers voted to ban the video-sharing app last year, amid concerns about its ties to the Chinese government and concerns that the app is a national security risk.

TikTok has repeatedly stated that it does not share information with Beijing.

But users and content creators say the social media platform has grown to become a staple of society – helping ordinary users grab the limelight with millions of followers. It has quickly become a preferred social media for some and an important revenue stream for others.

Now they worry about what will happen if the ban is not stopped.

Creators who make a living from social media apps told the BBC that TikTok is the superior platform.

That was true for Ms Thomspon, whose first TikTok video garnered more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

“I haven’t experienced the same success on other platforms,” ​​she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and not get even close to the engagement.”

Ross Smith, who shares funny videos with his 98-year-old grandmother to more than 24 million followers on TikTok, described it as one of the few platforms where it’s easy to become a creator.

On TikTok, he said, “you can find success overnight”.

Other platforms trying to replicate the short scrolling format of TikTok have yet to find success, Smith told the BBC. Mrs. Thompson agreed.

“I rarely hear about people going viral on Instagram or someone being an Instagram sensation, but those are words you often hear on TikTok,” Thompson said.

Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences don’t necessarily move from one platform to another.

“I know someone who has hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers and maybe only ten thousand Instagram followers,” James told the BBC.

Many content creators survive on the income they earn on TikTok.

Some told the BBC their lives would change disproportionately without the platform.

When brands and companies want promotional content from a creator, they want those creators to post on TikTok, Nicole Bloomgarden, a fashion designer and artist, told the BBC.

“Indirectly, TikTok was the majority of my income because all brands want their stuff promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.

It’s not statistically clear whether creators’ most lucrative source of income is TikTok, but many told the BBC it makes up a significant part of their income.

A 2022 survey from the creator-focused start-up Linktreefound that about 12% of full-time creators earned more than $50,000 per year from their social media platforms.

About 46% said they earned less than $1,000, the survey of 9,500 people found.

This is not the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.

In 2017, Vine – a platform where users could share video clips up to six seconds long – shut down.

For creators at the time, it was a shock.

Q Park, a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok, was one of those people.

He spent years building a following on Vine – the only platform he was using at the time – and when it disappeared, he said it “felt like my whole business shut down”.

But in some ways it was also good for him. It forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.

“That experience showed me that if you have faith in your ability to create content, you will build a following somewhere else,” said Mr. Park for the BBC.

As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – a TikTok competitor popular among young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.

RedNote was the most downloaded app on Apple’s US App Store earlier this week.

While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others are hoping the ban doesn’t materialize.

“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”

“It will be revived somehow, it’s too big an economy now.”

Additional reporting by Grace Dean and Nathalie Jimenez.