Just hours after Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a statewide ban on TikTok into law, a group of five Montana creators came together to file a lawsuit challenging the ban. For these creators, prohibiting their use of TikTok represents more than just a limit on their freedom of speech, but also a major threat to their livelihoods. 

“My husband is a rancher, and [ranchers] don't really make that much money. I mean, it's enough to live off of, but we had to take my son into the emergency room the other night, because he fell in the shower and busted his chin open, and we wouldn't have been able to do that with my husband's income,” said Carly Goddard, a lifestyle TikTok creator living in Custer, Montana, a town with a population of roughly 150 people, and one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “My income helps us be able to do stuff like that—pay for fuel, pay to just put food on the table,” she said. “[TikTok] basically feeds my family.”

For the vast majority of creators, sponsorships from brands make up the largest portion of their income. More than 68% of creators cited brand deals as their “highest-earning revenue source,” and nearly one in three creators said they turned to TikTok to monetize their content, according to a report from the platform Influencer Marketing Hub.

Under the Montana ban, TikTok and app store operators such as Apple and Google would face fines of $10,000 per day for “each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok.” TikTok users would not be penalized under the ban. 

Also read: TikTok tests its own AI chatbot Tako

Though the ban on the platform isn’t slated to take effect until Jan. 1, 2024, and TikTok itself has issued its own lawsuit against the Montana government, there is still a feeling of apprehension among creators such as Goddard, as well as marketers based in the state with clients who rely on TikTok as part of their social strategies. 

Goddard has been able to triple her family’s income since she first began leveraging TikTok as a revenue stream just under a year ago. She charges roughly $300 per video and has generated an average of $2,000 to $3,000 per month, largely through sponsorships from companies such as cookware brand Caraway and Tatcha, a beauty and skincare brand. In April alone Goddard drew in $6,000 from partnering with brands, she said, which included clothing brand Cupshe, cat food brand Smalls and kitchen appliance brand Nostalgia Products.

Though Goddard has promoted her accounts on other platforms, including Instagram, YouTube and even Lemon8 (which like TikTok is owned by ByteDance), her TikTok following of nearly 100,000 dwarfs the few thousand people following her across all of those other platforms combined. TikTok has been the only platform that she’s received brand deals to post sponsored videos on, she said, and the state’s ban on the platform would put a stop to that steadily growing income source. 

“Without TikTok, I mean, we've been talking about moving, because it's hard to live off of just one income, especially since I've been doing this for a while now,” she said. “It helps with bills; it helps with everything.” 

Heather DiRocco, one of the other TikTok creators suing the Montana government, also earns a large portion of her income through brand deals on the platform. DiRocco, who has amassed over 200,000 followers and more than 4.3 million overall likes on her TikTok account @ladydredknot, has worked with makeup brands Wet n Wild and Besame Cosmetics, and wellness brand Aries Essentials, among others, since she first began charging brands for sponsored posts in 2021.  

DiRocco's starting rate for a TikTok video is $1,300, and depending on the number of brands she partners with in a given month, her earnings from these brand deals can comprise anywhere from 10% to 30% of her family’s income, she said. Though she also owns two small businesses—one of which she occasionally uses her TikTok account to promote, netting her sales from across the country—the supplemental income she earns through brand partnerships on TikTok has played a crucial role in supporting her three children, DiRocco said.

“With how high the cost of living is here, it’s like, how are you going to take that [income stream] away from everyone? Just because you don’t understand the app, you’re going to ostracize it?” she said. “You're going to take away all of those fans and all that hard work we put into TikTok and we can't get back. We can't replicate it. We can't transfer it to a new social media app—and even if we tried to or attempted to, it's not even going to react the same way.”

DiRocco has been attempting to direct her followers on TikTok to her Instagram account since 2020, when the Trump administration first threatened a nationwide ban on TikTok. But those efforts have had little impact, and her 200,000-plus following on TikTok still eclipses the roughly 23,000 followers on her Instagram account. Her much larger reach on TikTok also means the vast majority of brands are only interested in sponsoring her TikTok content.

“I have over 200,000 followers. That’s the equivalent of how many [TikTok] users there are here in this state,” DiRocco said in a video discussing the ban. “It’s not a lot, but it is kind of a lot. That’s 200,000 people who are not going to be able to access things on this app anymore … whose voices are being silenced, whose businesses are being affected, and whose freedom of speech and commerce and everything else is being stripped from them.”

Threatening brands’ social strategies

For Kinetic Marketing & Creative, an agency based in Billings, Montana, the TikTok ban is already presenting a significant disruption to many of the agency’s clients. As the agency works to map out its clients’ social strategies in advance for 2024, the statewide ban on TikTok has introduced uncertainty into that process for several of Kinetic’s Montana-based clients who rely on the platform to connect with younger consumers, said Dana Pulis, the agency’s owner and principal. 

“We’re already seeing impacts from the ban, because we set our clients’ strategies and plans [for 2023] back in October or November,” she said. “We’ve been thinking about how this will affect our clients’ businesses and their business models—which in some cases are very heavily reliant on TikTok, because it’s the main marketing channel for them. They have influencers on TikTok that they’re working with, and sometimes TikTok is the only place that those influencers do work with brands.”

Ultimately, the ban has left Kinetic and its clients in a state of limbo as they await the outcome of the legal challenges both TikTok and the group of five creators have mounted against the Montana government, Pulis said. But if the ban does in fact survive the legal battle and take effect in January, several of the agency’s clients won’t simply be able to replace TikTok’s role in their social strategies with alternate platforms such as Instagram, she said. 

For a handful of Kinetic’s clients—particularly those seeking to reach members of Gen Z, younger millennials, or Gen Alpha—TikTok is a crucial platform in these brands’ efforts to reach that consumer demographic, Pulis added. Over 1.4 billion people used TikTok in each month of 2022, and over 77% of those people were younger than 35 according to Business of Apps. “Thanks to its highly effective algorithm, TikTok is such a strong discovery tool—far beyond what its competitors offer,” said Permele Doyle, president and founder of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, in an email. “And that helps consumers find inspirational, aspirational and educational content more easily, while also allowing brands and creators to reach larger audiences and grow their following faster.”

On the other hand, Evan Horowitz, CEO and co-founder of creative agency Movers+Shakers, views the Montana TikTok ban and the surrounding legal challenges as an opportunity to determine whether rumblings about the desire to ban TikTok in other states—or even across the country—have any legal backing. 

“This has been in the news for so long—this grandstanding and saber-rattling from politicians around TikTok,” he said of the app with over 150 million users in the U.S.. “This ban will just allow us to kind of flush the system out and see if there are legal grounds or not. I think it’ll be healthy for the industry.”

“It seems very unlikely that this is going to pass legal muster,” he added. “So, now at least we can get a kind of clarity.”