The nearly annual discussions of the U.S. banning TikTok have been a simmering source of anxiety for creators on the platform, but one that most TikTokers were confident would never materialize. Now, though, creators believe the likelihood of TikTok being banned in the country is higher than ever before, sparking an urgency for influencers to look to other platforms and sources of revenue. 

“The majority of my income since I was in high school has been from being a content creator,” said Nadya Okamoto, who has 4 million TikTok followers and is the co-founder of period care brand August. “For me, [TikTok] is 70% of my income, but for many creators—like my sister, for example—it’s 100% of [their] income. And I think that in the age of moving away from traditional forms of advertising and bigger influencer budgets, a platform like TikTok has big economic effects for millions of creators.” 

This isn’t the first time a TikTok ban has been floated by the U.S. government, which argues the app being owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, presents a national security risk. Last May, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte banned the app in the state, driving a group of TikTok creators who live in Montana to file a lawsuit in opposition to the law. Gianforte’s statewide ban, which has since been blocked by a federal judge, followed a five-hour Congressional hearing last March where lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about the app’s potential connection to the Chinese government. 

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Following Chew’s testimony, hundreds of TikTokers mocked the out-of-touch questions that members of Congress pressed Chew on during the hearing, such as whether TikTok accesses Wi-Fi networks (which, of course, it does). Overall, though, there was not a sense of panic among the creator community. 

But as legislation requiring ByteDance to sell TikTok or face a U.S. ban makes its way from the House to the Senate, hundreds of creators, including Okamoto, are rallying their followers against the ban with the hashtag #KeepTikTok. In the past week, the hashtag has generated 68 million views and been included on more than 26,000 posts.

“I'm actually spending a lot of time right now talking to media, making content about hashtag #KeepTikTok and then kind of engaging my followers,” Okamoto said. “The hashtag #KeepTikTok is something that I think creators are really speaking up for, and that’s really important right now.” 

Other creators are sharing contingency plans with their TikTok audience and urging them to follow their accounts on other social platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube. Coco Mocoe, a creator and host of the podcast “Ahead of the Curve,” is “making an aggressive push” to encourage her 1 million TikTok followers to subscribe to her YouTube channel, where she has nearly 50,000 followers, she told Ad Age. 

Mocoe has spent the last several months developing a YouTube interview series—a content strategy spurred by Chew’s appearance before Congress last year, which “kind of lit a fire under [her] and made [her] realize nothing is promised,” she said.

“As creators, there might be times where we feel entitled to certain platforms where we built up a following, but at the end of the day, that can be gone—and that’s just the name of the game,” Mocoe said. “I’m old enough to remember Vine, and when that ended, the creators that were able to jump ship were the ones who survived. And because of that, I've always been afraid to rely on one platform.” 

“But TikTok is my biggest audience,” she added. “I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t afraid. TikTok’s my main source of income, from the Creativity Program to the sponsorships that I get. So, it's definitely still terrifying.” 

TikTok’s “Creativity Program Beta” revenue sharing program, which the platform last week renamed the “Creator Rewards Program,” has been extremely lucrative for many creators since TikTok began piloting it last year. Many have posted videos sharing that they’ve earned thousands of dollars per month solely through views on their content. In the past six months, the overall revenue TikTok creators have earned through the program has increased by more than 250% and the number of creators who rake in at least $50,000 per month has doubled in that same period, according to TikTok.

On top of the income creators have been earning through TikTok’s newest revenue-sharing model, many creators have relied on the platform to secure the brand deals that comprise the majority of their earnings. Nearly 82% of creators generate income through sponsored social content, according to a survey from influencer marketing platform Later Influence, formerly Mavrck. And in recent years, a growing number of those sponsorships have shifted from Instagram to TikTok. Roughly 70% of brands now leverage TikTok for influencer marketing, compared to 47% of brands who report working with creators on Instagram and 33% who sponsor YouTube creators, according to Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2024 benchmark report. 

“With TikTok, the exposure is unlike any other app that we’ve seen,” Mocoe said. “So, I think for creators, the brand deals were really great because there was just a bigger chance of you getting seen by more people, versus getting a brand deal on YouTube or Instagram where you have to build up an audience for years to really get noticed. TikTok has just been a really great way to get more eyes on you—and the more eyes you have, the more money you make.”

Not the end of influencers

Many creators have built up larger audiences on TikTok than on other social platforms, said James Nord, founder and CEO of influencer marketing agency Fohr, in an email. Okamoto, for instance, has more than 4 million TikTok followers but only 289,000 Instagram followers. And Mocoe has a TikTok audience of 1 million, compared to just over 67,000 on Instagram. 

“It’s a lot easier for creators to build an audience on TikTok because of the way that the algorithm works,” said Madeline Cruz, founder of social media agency Social Con Cultura, which last month launched its “BIPOC Creator Marketplace” influencer marketing arm. “The algorithm pushes you out to an immense sea of people, so if two or three people like your video, they're gonna push it out to two or three more people, then even more people.”

Many of Cruz’s clients, largely local businesses in the Washington D.C. area, have shifted their social and influencer marketing budgets from YouTube, Meta and  X (formerly Twitter) to TikTok over the past few years, she said. Developing TikTok strategies and creating TikTok content is one of the main reasons clients come to Social Con Cultura, she added, so “a ban would be a huge hit to our revenue as a whole.” For local businesses, TikTok’s growing use as a search engine among younger consumers “drives huge conversions” and “a lot of in-store traffic” that would dry up if the platform were banned, she said.

Larger agencies have also leaned further into TikTok over the past year, with shops such as Day One Agency and Dentsu Creative U.S. upping their investments in in-house TikTok creators and Edelman launching a new offering to connect clients to a network of creators to produce video content for those clients’ TikTok channels. 

Fohr plans to pay out over $20 million to TikTok creators in 2024 alone, Nord said. But most of the agency’s clients run influencer campaigns across both TikTok and Instagram, “usually skewing a bit more heavily on Instagram,” so a TikTok ban wouldn’t completely derail their influencer marketing strategies, he said. 

“Some marketing dollars would go to Instagram and YouTube, and influencer marketing as an industry would shrink, but ultimately it would be fine,” Nord said. “It’s important to start back-up planning for the possibility, but it’s not as urgent as you might think. We’re still months out from any eventual disruption of marketing on TikTok, and most advertisers aren’t planning their influencer campaigns six months in advance.”

If a nationwide TikTok ban is enacted, “brands and creators will have to transition to alternative short-form platforms including Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, as the assets can pretty easily be replicated cross-channel,” Permele Doyle, co-founder and president of influencer marketing agency Billion Dollar Boy, said in an email.

And with many brand deals already calling for content across both Instagram and TikTok, marketers would likely just shift more of their short-form video work with creators to Instagram Reels, said both Shana Davis-Ross, founder and CEO of talent management agency Ponte Firm, and Emily Ward, co-founder of influencer management agency Shine Talent Group. So far, though, Ward hasn’t seen any clients preemptively pivoting their campaigns from TikTok to Instagram as discussions of a TikTok ban intensify, she said. 

“I think to be successful and have longevity in this space, you can not put all your eggs in one basket,” she said. “And talent might capture more of their audience through one platform and one style of content, but … at the end of the day, [influencers] are operating on platforms that they don’t own to begin with. So, we have always advised our talent to have multiple platforms and to strategically diversify their content, but also be driving their followers to something that they do own, like a newsletter or a website.” 

Joe Gagliese, co-founder and CEO of digital and social agency Viral Nation, considers YouTube Shorts to be “one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now,” he said. Many of Mocoe’s nearly 50,000 YouTube subscribers came from her Shorts content, she said, and she plans to turn clips from her upcoming long-form YouTube series into Shorts to extend the reach of her content on the platform. 

As discussions about a potential TikTok ban continue, TikTok creators should prioritize building up their social media presence on other platforms, Gagliese said. Since last March, when Chew’s testimony before Congress stoked fears of a possible ban on the platform, Viral Nation’s talent agency division has been working with creators to help them diversify their social content and develop strategies on other channels so their careers “don’t just end there [with TikTok],” he said. 

“I saw what ‘just ending there’ looks like, and that was when Vine got taken away,” he said. “The creators who worked really hard for the six months to build a YouTube presence continued, and folks who were like ‘this is never going to happen’ were looking for jobs after.” Two of Viral Nation’s current employees were former Vine stars the agency worked, Gagliese said. They were out of work when the platform was shuttered.

But for some creators, responding to a TikTok ban wouldn’t be as simple as pivoting to another platform, Okamoto said. 

“The way that people consume content on [TikTok] is totally different [than other platforms], and I see a lot of congressional leaders basically saying, ‘Don’t be so angry—there’s already Instagram,’” she said. “But it’s not the same thing. It’s a completely different algorithm and also a different focus on the type of content—visuals and infographics versus short-form video; the ‘For You’ page versus who you’re following. That’s what I want to stress to people: it’s not like there’s just another TikTok that we’re going to hop to. It’s not something we’ll just be able to replace.”