TikTok Begins Imposing Paywalls for 20-Minute Videos

Video creators may charge between $1 and $190 per month via the app's new feature, Series.

TikTok
Shallow Focus Photo of a Man Making a Vlog Karolina Grabowska | Pexels

TikTok now allows content creators to monetize their videos behind a paywall by charging for access to premium features and content. The length of such clips may also be much more than the average TikTok clip.

TikTok Series

Earlier Tuesday, Mar. 7, the firm unveiled a new feature called Series, which enables video makers to compile and sell collections of their recordings.

There may be up to 80 videos in a series. Each video can be up to 20 minutes long, making TikTok more akin to a full-length vlog on YouTube than a quick-and-easy social media app as it has always been.

Video creators may charge anything from $1 to $190 per month, and viewers can pay via in-video or profile-based purchase links. Paywalls are only available for a subset of artists for now, but the application process will expand in the near future.

Upon debut, artists on TikTok will retain 100% of their earnings after deducting processing and app store fees, which will amount to a loss of more than 30%.

According to Verge, TikTok has been vague on how part of its income would be distributed. But, artists will have access to a new Series portal where they can upload videos and monitor their success outside of the TikTok app, through which purchases must be made.

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This illustration picture taken on May 27, 2020 in Paris shows the logo of the social network application Tik Tok on the screen of a phone. (Photo by Martin BUREAU / AFP) Photo by MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images

Creative and Monetization Tools

TikTok has released a number of creative tools and monetization choices over the last several months in an effort to increase user growth in the US and better compete with other platforms such as YouTube. With competitors like YouTube's Shorts offering ad revenue-sharing options, TikTok must do all it can to help its content producers generate money if it wants to retain them on the platform.

Several TikTok artists have complained about low payouts in the past. A few members in the first $1 billion creator fund, announced in 2020, have reported earning just pennies when their material is not going viral, despite the fund's promise of payment for three years.

The fact that 20-minute videos are becoming a thing on TikTok is not a fluke, said the Verge. Users are noticing that their videos are growing longer. Slowly but surely, the company doubled the maximum video duration for premium content from 10 minutes to 20.

Last month, TikTok unveiled a redesigned creator fund dubbed the Creativity Program, which only awards videos longer than a minute in length to encourage producers to generate material that is at least two minutes in length.

Trisha Andrada
Tech Times
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