The short version: the Creativity Program pays roughly 10 to 20 times more than the old Creator Fund ever did, and by 2026 the Creator Fund barely exists anyway because TikTok has been quietly retiring it in favour of the Creativity Program (now often labelled the Creator Rewards Program in the app). If you're still on the Creator Fund, switch. If you're new to TikTok monetisation, you're not choosing between two live options, you're choosing whether to bother chasing platform payouts at all, or go after the money that's bigger.
What the Creator Fund paid (past tense, mostly)
The Creator Fund launched in the US and UK back in 2020, and I remember the excitement dying within about six weeks of creators seeing their first payout. The rate hovered between $0.02 and $0.04 per 1,000 views. Not per thousand followers, per thousand views. A video that pulled in a million views, which felt like a huge win to most people posting it, earned somewhere between $20 and $40.
I worked with a UK-based food creator in 2022 who had just crossed 500,000 followers. One of her videos hit 1.2 million views in four days, the kind of number that gets you excited and gets your inbox full of "congratulations" messages. Her Creator Fund payout for that video was £14. She'd spent six hours filming and editing it. That's the bit nobody tells you when they're hyping up "getting paid to post."
The Creator Fund also had a habit of being wildly inconsistent. Two videos with near-identical view counts could pay completely different amounts depending on watch time, audience location, and factors TikTok never fully explained. Creators compared notes constantly on Discord servers and Reddit threads trying to reverse-engineer a formula that TikTok never published.
By late 2023 TikTok started rolling new US creators into the Creativity Program Beta instead of the Creator Fund. Through 2024 they widened that rollout to more countries, and by now, heading through 2026, most active creators have either been migrated automatically or had their Creator Fund access quietly switched off. If you check your TikTok app and Creator Fund is still an option, it's worth assuming it won't be for much longer.
What the Creativity Program pays instead
The Creativity Program (renamed Creator Rewards Program for many accounts) changed the entire model. Instead of a flat, tiny per-view rate, TikTok started paying more like a proper ad-revenue share, closer to how YouTube's ad revenue model has worked for years. Rates aren't fixed and TikTok has never published an exact formula, but creators consistently report earnings in the range of $0.40 to $1.00 per 1,000 qualifying views, sometimes higher for videos with strong watch time and a US or UK-heavy audience.
That same food creator I mentioned, once she moved onto the Creativity Program in 2024, posted a similar recipe video that hit 1.1 million views. Her payout was £287. Compare that to the £14 she'd have made under the old Fund for a near-identical video. That's roughly a 20x jump for essentially the same content, same audience, same effort.
I've written before with actual worked examples about how much TikTok pays for 1 million views under the current system, and the honest range people should expect is somewhere between £300 and £900 for a million views, depending on niche, watch time, and audience location. Finance and business content tends to pay toward the top of that range because advertisers pay more to reach that audience. Comedy and lip-sync content tends to sit lower.
The catch nobody puts in the headline
Here's the part most "which pays more" articles skip entirely: the Creativity Program only pays out on videos over one minute long. That's not a minor footnote, it's the whole design of the programme. TikTok isn't paying more because it suddenly got generous with creators. It's paying more because it wants you making longer videos that carry more ad breaks, so it can compete with YouTube for the same advertiser budgets and the same watch-time metrics that keep people scrolling for longer sessions.
That means if your whole style is 15 to 30 second punchy videos, which is still what a huge chunk of TikTok's best-performing content looks like, you don't qualify for Creativity Program payouts at all on those videos. You either stretch your content to fit a business model that isn't built for your format, or you accept that platform payouts were never going to be your main income line anyway. I'd rather creators heard that plainly than kept refreshing their balance waiting for a payday that their content format was never eligible for.
Eligibility: what you need for each
For the Creativity Program (Creator Rewards Program), TikTok requires:
- At least 10,000 followers
- At least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days
- Account age of at least 30 days
- You must be 18 or older
- Videos must be over 1 minute in length to be eligible for that video's earnings
- Original content that follows TikTok's Community Guidelines
- You must be based in an eligible country (the list has expanded steadily since 2023 but still excludes a chunk of the world)
If you're under that 10,000 follower mark, you're not locked out of earning on TikTok entirely, and I've covered the other routes in detail in this piece on getting paid on TikTok without 10,000 followers, because gifts, TikTok Shop commissions, and brand deals don't care about that threshold the way the Creativity Program does.
How to switch or apply
If you're eligible and want to move over, the steps are straightforward:
- Go to your TikTok profile, tap the menu icon, then Creator Tools
- Look for "Creativity Program Beta" or "Creator Rewards Program" (naming varies by app version and region)
- Check your eligibility status; TikTok will flag exactly which requirement you're missing if you don't qualify yet
- Accept the terms, which include agreeing that videos under 60 seconds won't earn through this programme
- Once accepted, TikTok automatically moves eligible content into the new payout structure; you don't need to resubmit old videos
If you're not there yet on followers or views, working through a structured push like the one I laid out in this walkthrough on joining a TikTok Creator Growth Challenge is a faster way to hit those thresholds than just posting and hoping.
The bit that matters more than either programme
I'll say the uncomfortable thing plainly: neither the Creator Fund nor the Creativity Program was ever going to make anyone a full-time living off views alone, unless you're posting multiple times a day and consistently hitting millions of views. Even at the improved Creativity Program rates, a creator needs roughly 3.5 million views a month just to match UK minimum wage from platform payouts alone. Most creators, including plenty with six-figure follower counts, don't hit that consistently.
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The real money on TikTok, and this is the part creator courses and "how to go viral" threads gloss over, comes from brand partnerships, TikTok Shop affiliate commissions, and your own products or services. A single sponsored post from a mid-tier creator with 200,000 followers typically earns £500 to £3,000, more than most of them make from the Creativity Program in an entire month. TikTok Shop commissions on a good-converting product can run 10 to 20 percent per sale, and a creator with a engaged (not just large) audience can quietly out-earn their platform payout by a factor of ten through affiliate links alone.
That's not a reason to ignore the Creativity Program. Take the money, it's better than it was and it costs you nothing to switch. But treat it as a small, steady bonus on top of a real content business, not the business itself. The creators I've watched build something sustainable over the past few years are the ones who used their view counts as proof of audience to land brand deals, not as their actual income line. If you want the wider picture on how creator economics and platform behaviour are shifting, the numbers in this rundown of social media facts and trends are still a useful reality check on where attention, and money, is moving.
So which one should you be on
If your account still shows Creator Fund as an option, apply to switch to the Creativity Program today, there's no version of this where staying on the old Fund benefits you. If you're building from scratch, don't design your content strategy around either programme's payout rates, design it around getting brand deals and building an audience that trusts you enough to buy what you recommend. The platform payout is the smallest, least reliable income line most creators will ever have, and by 2026 TikTok itself has made that pretty clear by phasing out the programme that paid the least.
I keep every related walkthrough in the TikTok Help: 19 Guides to Views, Pay, Freezing Fixes, Followers and TikTok Shop. For a personalised estimate, try the Free TikTok Money Calculator: What Your Views and Followers Are Worth.
Related reading: %"creator rewards program".
Related reading: 1 minute growth program.
Frequently asked questions
Can I be on both the Creator Fund and the Creativity Program at the same time?
No. TikTok requires you to choose one or the other, and once you join the Creativity Program you exit the Creator Fund permanently for that account. Given the pay difference, there's no financial reason to stay on the Creator Fund if you're eligible for the newer programme.
Why did my Creativity Program earnings drop suddenly?
Payouts fluctuate with watch time, audience location, and how many videos on the platform are competing for the same ad budget that month. A video with strong views but weak completion rate will pay less than a shorter-viewed video that people watch all the way through, so a drop usually means retention slipped, not that TikTok changed the rules.
Do I need 10,000 followers to earn anything on TikTok?
No, that threshold only applies to the Creativity Program itself. Creators with far fewer followers can still earn through TikTok Shop commissions, brand gifting, and paid partnerships, all of which typically pay more per post than either monetisation programme anyway.
Is it worth stretching my videos to over a minute just to qualify for Creativity Program payouts?
Only if longer content still performs well with your audience. Padding a video just to hit the 60-second mark tends to hurt watch time, which lowers your payout rate anyway, so it can end up cancelling out the benefit you were chasing.
