TikTok users speak out as Creator Fund glitch stops stars from being paid

Users on TikTok who hit the threshold for access to the Creator Fund have been finding themselves unable to access any form of payment due to a glitch on the app’s registration system. The platform is working on a fix for the issue.

The TikTok Creator Fund was launched in the middle of 2020 as a proposed $2 billion dollar fund to pay the makers of content on the app.

While this amount sounds mind-boggling, it’s still dwarfed by the $15 billion that YouTube pays out to content creators yearly. However, the three-year initiative is a start for monetization on the billion-user platform.

Despite this, reaping monetary gain from the work put into making, and maintaining a popular TikT0k brand has been a goal for hundreds, if not thousands of makers worldwide.

Those dreams have been unceremoniously halted in their tracks over the past month as a number of TikTokers have found themselves blocked from registering for the fund, despite reaching all points of eligibility.

Turning to the r/TikTokHelp subreddit, complaints have arisen from finding issues at the same point in the process: age verification.

“I get an error message saying the page couldn’t load and to try again later. It allows me to fill out my birth date and email address, but when it comes to selecting my country and then uploading my identification, it won’t let me do anything at all,” one user said.

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Stories from dozens of creators all run along the same line — an inability to appropriately register for the fund.

Halting the ability to withdraw from the fund entirely, users have been understandably upset and disheartened by this.

Following requests for comment, TikTok creator Matt Mooney told Bloomberg: “Once I finally hit 10,000 followers, I felt pretty achieved. And then seeing that glitch, it’s a very defeating feeling, every time I post, all I can think about now is how much I would have gotten in the creator fund.”

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TikTok have announced that the company is “aware of an issue that is impacting the sign up flow for the Creator Fund and are actively working on a fix that should be available in the next few days.”

Whether this will mean payment for creators will be backdated remains to be seen.