TikTok stars, many of them young and holding down other jobs, are struggling to make money, despite millions of views, due to a lack of monetization tools
This story is part of the VICE guide to 2030. Reach more here. — Keondra is 20 years old, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota … Tweets: @laurenkgurley and @jason_koebler Tweets: Lauren Kaori Gurley / @laurenkgurley : For VICE's Guide to 2030, I spoke to young TikTok influencers who work low wage jobs, and wrote a deep dive on the invisible (unpaid) labor of TikTok stardom. https://www.vice.com/... Jason Koebler / @jason_koebler : TikTok influencers are driving our culture but not making any money https://www.vice.com/... very great, deep look at online labor in 2020 by the always great @LaurenKGurley
Context & Ripple Effects
This VICE deep dive for the Guide to 2030 documents the gap at the center of TikTok's rise: creators like Keondra, a 20-year-old in St. Paul working low-wage jobs alongside stardom, generate the culture the platform runs on while lacking the tools to convert views into income. It extends reporting that began when TikTok users started supplanting record labels' scouting and publicity functions — the audience-side value was visible long before any payout mechanism existed.
The months after this piece show the platform and its ecosystem scrambling to close that gap: TikTok launched a $200M creator fund whose low payouts and opaque calculations drew immediate complaints, while off-platform intermediaries moved into the vacuum, with LA collab houses facing allegations of exploitative managers withholding money.
First-order effects
- Young creators with millions of views must treat TikTok fame as unpaid labor, subsidizing it with day jobs because the platform offers no meaningful revenue share on their content.
Second-order effects
- TikTok is pushed into launching its $200M creator fund as a stopgap, which itself draws complaints about low payouts and non-transparent formulas; meanwhile third-party managers and collab houses rush to monetize creators directly, creating new extraction risks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, creator compensation gets patched by funds and intermediaries rather than native tools, leaving a class of viral stars structurally dependent on opaque platform decisions — a dynamic also visible among young musicians amassing huge followings while earning little.
The trend: Attention platforms are being forced to retrofit compensation systems onto creator labor they initially captured for free, with funds and middlemen filling the space where built-in monetization should be.