TikTok’s New Creator Program to Focus on Search-Friendly Content

TikTok officially launched its new monetization program, Creator Rewards, last week. The program is based on four evaluation metrics, including “search value”, which rewards creators who produce over 60 seconds long, high-quality, search-optimized videos.

By “search value,” the social media platform means publishing content that aligns with popular search terms. To help with this, TikTok launched the Creator Search Insights tool, which helps influencers research high-trending topics.

“With these insights, creators can source inspiration for their content, tailor their creative strategies to meet audience interests, and create content that people want to see more of,” the company’s blog post states.

TikTok, in addition to incentivizing in-demand search-related videos, will also prioritize originality, play duration (the total watch time and finish rate of videos), and audience engagement (the number of likes, comments, and shares received).

It will also reward creators for their accounts’ ad value, i.e., ad revenue based on their community’s ad watchtime for the first time.

However, to qualify for the Creator Rewards program, a creator must be 18 years or above, have a minimum of 10K followers, and have generated at least 100K views in the past 30 days. The user account must be in good standing and located in a region where TikTok is available.

Along with these announcements, TikTok also upgraded the earlier Creator Portal to the new Creator Academy, currently available in seven different languages.

The comprehensive education portal offers courses, articles, and other resources for monetizing TikTok videos, and publishers on TikTok can use the Creator Rewards Program dashboard to directly access the Academy and various resources available therein.

With this revamped program, the platform intends to leverage its untapped potential as a search engine tool and further drive user engagement.