The company hopes to encourage publishers to make videos with the aim of making more profits
TikTok is working on a new feature that allows content makers to offer videos for a sum of money, as publishers can select videos that the user can only watch after paying an amount starting from $1, according to a report published, Tuesday, by The Information.
Through this step, the company hopes to increase its audience base of older users, specifically in the United States, where most users are between the ages of 18 and 29. The company also hopes that this will help it encourage publishers to make video clips with the aim of achieving more profits.
This step is similar to what competing platforms such as YouTube and Instagram do, which allow content makers to publish exclusive clips for paid subscriptions to the publisher's channel that are not available to the general public.
In addition, TikTok intends to increase the earnings that free content creators receive for the views their posts get. According to the report, the profit-sharing program launched by the company three years ago has brought publishers up to $1 billion in profits, but many content makers say that the program pays very little for videos that do not achieve wide spread, which is what the company wants to change in next update.
TikTok plans to require a minimum of 100,000 followers before content creators can take advantage of the revenue-increasing program.
These upcoming updates come amid a difficult period that the Chinese company (ByteDance) is going through, the developer of TikTok, in light of requests to delete the application from the Google and Apple stores in the United States due to concerns about the way the company deals with the data of its American users.
US politicians are calling on the Biden administration to take swift action to impose strict laws on the data collected by the app, or to completely delete the app from app stores, due to concern over the link between the Chinese company and the Beijing government.
For several years, TikTok has been in talks with the US government's Foreign Investment Committee to reach an agreement regulating the company's work inside the country. The two parties are discussing a proposal to transfer the company's data to the United States so that that data becomes under American control, but this agreement has not yet been implemented, and it is not known whether ByteDance will reach such an agreement or that the US government will decide to prevent the application from Application stores.
And last month, the US House of Representatives issued a directive banning the use of the TikTok application on any mobile device belonging to the House of Representatives, as it poses a great danger to members of the House. In a similar move, last December, the Senate voted unanimously on a bill banning the application of TikTok in government agencies.
According to a report published by Statista, a company specializing in market studies, the number of users of the application in the United States has reached more than 94 million users, and it is expected that the number of users will exceed 100 million in 2025.
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