TikTok’s looking to solidify its connection with top creators, via the addition of a new Creator Effects funding program for top AR creators in the app, while it’s also expanding its Creativity Program, which provides direct funding for top-performing clips.

First off, on Creator Effects – TikTok’s announced a new Effect Creator Rewards initiative that will pay creators for high-performing effects.

As per TikTok:

“The $6 million dollar fund, available to creators in select regions, will offer payments to creators based on the community's engagement with their effects. At launch, for every effect that's used in 500K unique videos within 90 days of being published, a creator will collect $700 USD. For every 100K videos published thereafter within the same 90 days, creators will collect an additional $140.”

The program will provide additional incentive for AR creators to focus on TikTok, and add new, original experiences - which also have higher than normal potential to go viral, and spark more interest in the app.

Indeed, Snapchat has seen big success with its creator effects program, with over 300,000 AR creators having built over 3 million Lenses via its Lens Studio platform.

Those creations have sparked a range of in-app trends, and TikTok will be hoping to replicate similar success with its AR funding initiative, as it works to deepen its ties with its user community, while also further embedding its economic impact.

Because if TikTok is being relied on by more creators, that, at least in theory, could make it more difficult to ban, which the White House is still considering. Expanding its economic impact could become a key consideration in this respect – though the main focus is obviously on maximizing creative talent, in order to keep more users coming back to the app.

In addition to this, TikTok’s also expanding its Creativity Program, with more creators now able apply to take part in the content funding initiative.

TikTok’s Creativity Program, which it first launched back in February, is the next evolution of its Creator Fund initiative, providing direct payments for top-performing creators based on engagement with their clips.

Those payments, under the Creator Fund at least, have varied significantly, which is why TikTok’s now looking to build a more sustainable, workable solution to ensure that creators get paid based on relative content performance.

And now, more creators can sign up to the initial program:

“Eligible creators must be based in BR, FR, or the US, and have an account in good standing and at least 10k followers with a minimum of 100K views in the last 30 days and videos must be high-quality, original content that is longer than one minute. The Creativity Program Beta offers a new formula that provides a higher average gross revenue for qualified video views, giving creators the potential to earn higher rewards.”

TikTok hasn’t released an overview of exactly how the updated payment process works, but the idea is that it’s looking to establish a more sustainable, consistent pathway to monetization, based on performance.

Which is a critical focus, because short-form content monetization is hard, and revenue share is even harder, given that you can’t just insert mid and pre-roll ads, and then equate relative monetization impact based on aligned exposure.

That’s what eventually killed Vine (which Elon Musk keeps hinting will be coming back), and while TikTok already has a more sustainable process in place than Vine ever did, if it can’t provide a comparable monetization system to YouTube and IG, then creators will eventually de-prioritize the app, which could see it lose momentum.

Ideally, this new Creativity Program offers more solutions on this front - though TikTok says that this system will not re-route money from ads, so how exactly it will be sustainable, long term, remains to be seen.

Still, both are critical initiatives from the app, as it looks to solidify its presence, and build stronger foundations for ongoing success.

And again, the added benefit of playing a bigger role in the local economy is another consideration in its broader monetization push.