TikTok creators mourn app where ‘overnight’ success is possible

For online sensation Erika Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform to educate 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 that is set to be enacted next week – will be “substantive” financially for Ms Thompson, a Texas beekeeper, but it is also a loss of an educational tool.

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

Some 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 fate of the social media giant 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, over concerns about its links to the Chinese government and worries about the app being a national security risk.

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

But users and content creators say the social media platform has grown to become a fixture in society – and has helped regular users capture the limelight with millions of followers. It’s quickly become a preferred social media outlet to some and a key revenue stream for others.

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

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

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

“I have not experienced the same success on other platforms,” she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and receive not 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 is easy to become a creator.

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

Other platforms trying to replicate the short-form scroll format featured on TikTok have yet to find success, Mr Smith told the BBC. Ms Thompson agreed.

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

Codey James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of follower on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences do not necessarily transfer from one platform to another.

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

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

Some told the BBC that their lives would change inordinately without the platform.

When brands and companies want advertisement 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 to be promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.

It is not clear statistically if creators’ most lucrative source of income is TikTok, but many told the BBC that it makes up a substantial portion of their revenue.

A 2022 survey from the creator-focused start-up Linktree, found some 12% of full-time creators made more than $50,000 a year from their social media platforms.

Some 46% said they made 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 up to six-second-long video clips – 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 used at the time – and when it disappeared, he said it “felt like my whole business was shutting down”.

But in some ways, it was good for him, too. 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’ll build a following somewhere else,” Mr Park told the BBC.

As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – a TikTok competitor popular with 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 won’t come to fruition.

“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 of an economy now.”

Additional reporting from Grace Dean and Nathalie Jimenez.