Many rising TikTok stars who recently qualified to be paid for their popular videos have been shut out of the registration system, causing frustration and public outrage among some of the app’s most dedicated creators.
ByteDance Ltd’s video platform provides an incentive for people to post viral videos with a fund that compensates creators with large audiences. But for weeks, a glitch in the registration process has prevented sign-ups among some eligible accounts.
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Matt Mooney said he’s been posting three times a day in attempt to grow his account and join the creator fund. Since qualifying last week, he estimates that he’s checked whether the glitch has been fixed 20 times a day.
“Once I finally hit 10,000 followers, I felt pretty achieved. And then seeing that glitch, it’s a very defeating feeling,” Mooney said. “Every time I post, all I can think about now is how much I would have gotten in the creator fund.”
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Dozens of users on TikTok, Twitter and Reddit’s TikTokHelp forum tell a similar story of a bug preventing users from joining the fund, with posts dating back to Feb. 25.
“We are aware of an issue that is impacting the sign up flow for the Creator Fund and are actively working on a fix that should be available in the next few days,” TikTok said in a statement. “We continue to listen to and seek feedback from our creator community and evolve our features to improve the experience for those in the program.”