The TikTok company is working on a new feature that allows content makers to offer videos for a sum of money, as publishers can select videos that the user can only watch after paying an amount starting from one US dollar.
Through this step, the company hopes to increase its audience base from older users, specifically in the United States, where most users are between 18 and 29 years old. The company also hopes that this will help it encourage publishers to make videos in order to generate more profits.
This step is similar to what competing platforms such as YouTube and Instagram do, which allow content makers to publish exclusive clips for paid subscriptions to the publisher’s channel that are not available to all users.
In addition, TikTok intends to increase the profits that free content creators get for the views that their posts get. According to the report, the profit-sharing program that the company launched three years ago has brought publishers up to $1 billion in profits, but many content makers say that the program pays very little for videos that do not achieve wide circulation, which is what the company wants to change in updated next.
TikTok plans to require a minimum of 100,000 followers before content makers can take advantage of the profit-increasing program.
These upcoming updates come amid a difficult period that the Chinese company ByteDance, the developer of TikTok, is going through, in light of requests to delete the application from the Google and Apple stores in the United States due to concerns about the way the company deals with the data of its American users.
US politicians are calling on the Biden administration to take swift action to impose strict laws on the data collected by the app or to completely delete the app from app stores, due to concern about the link between the Chinese company and the Beijing government.
TikTok has been in talks for several years with the US government’s Foreign Investment Committee to reach an agreement regulating the company’s work inside the country. The two parties are discussing the proposal to transfer the company’s data to the United States so that that data becomes under American control, but this agreement has not yet been put into effect, and it is not known whether ByteDance will reach such an agreement or that the US government will decide to prevent the application from App Stores.
Last month, the US House of Representatives issued a directive banning the use of the TikTok application on any mobile device belonging to the House of Representatives, as it poses a great danger to members of Parliament. In a similar move, the Senate voted unanimously last December on a bill banning the application of TikTok in government agencies.
According to a report published by Statista, a company specializing in market studies, the number of users of the application in the United States has reached more than 94 million users, and it is expected that the number of its users will exceed 100 million in 2025.
