So...TikTok Sucks

Hank Green2 HN recommenders · 2022–2023
1.1M views · commentary · dated · Uploaded 2022-01-20

Hank Green, a TikTok creator with millions of followers, explains why he thinks TikTok underpays creators. He compares its fixed-pot creator fund with YouTube's revenue sharing.

Cited in threads on creator economics as a clear explanation of how TikTok payouts shrink per creator as the platform grows.

Watch on YouTube

6 comments from Hacker News

@athrowaway3z2022 · in “TikTok is scary good. It's digital crack”

[VIDEO] Worth the full watch on video media money. But tldw; TikTok splits a pot of money over the views each video gets. The pot doesn't grow with the revenue they make or total views, so it's pretty exploitative.

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@d0mine2022 · in “TikTok Boom”

The fond is fixed, it doesn’t depend on the number of creators. The more popular TikTok the less share creators get. [VIDEO]

@pas2022 · in “The fall of Reddit: Why it’s quickly declining into chaos”

> Reddit is hijacking content by requiring it to be hosted on it's own CDN.. does it require it or provide it as an option? as far as I know you can submit image URLs just fine. gyfcat and imgur videos are regularly on r/all. hosting multimedia content provides a better experience. does it have downsides? yes. just with google's AMP. a bit offtopic, but tiktok creators' fund is already shortshelling creators. [VIDEO] and this endless reposting of viral content ... well, it's ongoing since we have viral content. is it great? of course not, but it's not like the reddit CDN somehow changed anything with regards to this problem. youtube has contentID ... "creators" are free to organize and advocate for reddit/IG/tiktok to introduce it (or lobby US/EU/China to mandate it or whatever)

@status2002022 · in “The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok”

Tiktok will definitely be replaced by a similar app if they don't start paying out to their content creators in a similar way that Youtube (still awful, but better) does. Hank Green has a great video[0] on the difference since he is on both platforms, and unless there is more compensation to the creators, they will get burned out chasing the high of the occasional viral video. [0] [VIDEO]

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@delecti2023 · in “How TikTok Broke the Ad Business”

Hank Green, a fairly prominent Youtuber and increasingly successful Tiktoker did a video a while back, and AFAIK the situation with the TikTok creator fund hasn't changed significantly since. You basically TLDR'd it: their revenue-sharing is far worse than main Youtube videos, and even quite worse than Youtube's model for Shorts. [VIDEO]

@ADuckOnQuack2023 · in “Show HN: YouTube banned adblockers so I built an extension to skip their ads”

Tim Tok has been struggling with a massive problem where many creators that actually start to get big on the platform end up migrating to YouTube anyway because their pay sucks compared to YouTube, the same goes for instagram and every other platform in the industry. Youtube has a lot of problems but nobody pays better than them [VIDEO]