Since July 2020, TikTok has paid creators for views under three different names: the Creator Fund, the Creativity Program Beta, and today's Creator Rewards Program. One of those handovers was a genuine rebuild. One was a rename with a formula bolted on. Most write-ups flatten all of it into a single sentence, that the Creator Fund paid pennies and Creator Rewards pays more, which is true and close to useless. The interesting part is the sequence, the dates, and what TikTok changed at each step, because the changes were rarely about the rate.
Here is the thing almost nobody says out loud. Across three programs and six years, TikTok has published exactly zero pay rates. Not one per-view price, in any program document, on any help page, in any market, at any point. It will tell you at length what makes a payout go up. It has never told you what a view is worth. Every TikTok RPM figure you have ever read, including the one on this site, is somebody's estimate of a number TikTok has never disclosed. Hold onto that, because it explains why the "why" behind each change is so much better documented than the "how much."
The three programs, dated
| Program | Launched | Ended or renamed | Eligibility bar at the time | What it paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creator Fund | July 22, 2020 (US) | December 16, 2023 in the US, UK, France and Germany | 18+, and from March 2021: 10,000 followers, 100,000 views in 30 days | About $0.02 to $0.05 per 1,000 views. CREATOR-REPORTED |
| Creativity Program (Beta) | February 20, 2023 (US, invite-only) | Renamed March 2024 | 18+, 10,000 followers, 100,000 views in 30 days, videos over 1 minute | No defensible per-1,000 figure exists. UNDOCUMENTED |
| Creator Rewards Program | March 18, 2024 | Current program | Unchanged: 18+, 10,000 followers, 100,000 views in 30 days, videos at least 1 minute | About $0.40 to $1.00 per 1,000 qualified views. MARKET ESTIMATE |
Launch dates and eligibility come from TikTok Newsroom posts and the Creator Rewards Program Terms (US, last updated July 20, 2026). The Creator Fund end date comes from a TikTok statement given to Engadget and TechCrunch on November 7, 2023, and appears on no TikTok page. Pay figures are labelled by where they come from, and none of them come from TikTok.
2020: the Creator Fund, a fixed pot
TikTok announced the Creator Fund on July 22, 2020 with $200 million for US creators. The Newsroom post is still up, and it is worth reading for what it does not contain. Eligibility was "18 years or older, meet a baseline for followers, and consistently post original content." No follower number. No view threshold. No rate. A later update on the same post raised the ambition sharply: the fund would "grow to over $1 billion in the US in the next 3 years, and more than double that globally."
The first time TikTok put real numbers on the door was March 25, 2021, when the fund went live across Europe. That post is specific: $70 million to start, rising to $300 million within three years, across the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain, for creators 18 or older with at least 10,000 followers and over 100,000 video views in the past 30 days. Those two thresholds are the most durable numbers in this entire story. They have not moved since.
What that post still did not do was say what a view was worth. It never did.
What creators actually reported
Every Creator Fund rate in circulation is creator-reported, which means it is a handful of individual disclosures rather than a sample of anything.
The clearest one is Hank Green's. Tubefilter reported on January 24, 2022 that Green had gone from roughly 5 cents per 1,000 views in 2020 to roughly 2.5 cents per 1,000 by early 2022, on a bigger audience. Not a smaller audience. A bigger one, earning half as much per view.
CBS News, covering the fund's closure on November 7, 2023, collected three more disclosures: Green at about 2.5 cents per 1,000 views, tech creator SuperSaf at 112 pounds (about $137) over roughly ten months against more than 25 million views, and MrBeast at about $14,910 over roughly ten months. If SuperSaf's two figures cover the same window, that works out to well under a cent per 1,000 views, though he did not say they do and that arithmetic is ours, not his.
Treat all of those as anecdotes with names attached. They are the best evidence that exists, and they are still anecdotes.
Why the rate fell as TikTok grew
Green's video did something more useful than report his own RPM. It explained the mechanism, and the mechanism is the reason the Creator Fund was doomed.
The fund was a fixed pool. Divide $200 million by 365 days and you get about $550,000 a day for all US creators, together. That number does not move when TikTok's revenue grows, when the app adds users, or when a hundred thousand new creators join the fund. So the more creators qualify and the better their content performs, the less each view is worth. Green's line was that when TikTok becomes more successful, TikTokers become less successful.
That is the creator-side narrative, and it is an inference from the fund's structure rather than something TikTok confirmed. It is an inference with unusually strong support, though: it predicts exactly the falling per-view rate creators reported, and the replacement program abandoned the fixed-pot framing entirely. When the fix quietly concedes the diagnosis, the diagnosis was probably right.
TikTok's own stated reason, given later, was softer. It said it developed the new program "based on learnings and feedback from our creators on our creator solutions, including the TikTok Creator Fund." Read that sentence twice. The feedback comes from creators, about creator solutions generally, with the Fund named as one item on a list. It is a real statement of cause, carefully constructed to avoid naming a defect.
2023: the Creativity Program Beta changes what TikTok is buying
On February 20, 2023, TikTok announced the Creativity Program Beta for US creators, invite-only at first, after testing it in France and Brazil. The Newsroom post says the goal is to "help creators foster their creativity, generate higher revenue potential and unlock more exciting, real-world opportunities," and that creators must "create and publish high-quality, original content longer than one minute."
That last clause is the actual news. The Creator Fund paid on any video. The Creativity Program paid only on videos over a minute. TikTok was not merely raising the rate, it was changing what it was willing to buy, and what it chose to buy was the format that carries ads comfortably and competes directly with YouTube. Every creator whose entire craft was the fifteen-second hook woke up outside the program.
The rollout was quick. US general availability arrived on May 3, 2023 at the familiar 10,000 followers and 100,000 views in 30 days. By September 15, 2023 the program had reached Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Korea and the UK.
The pay figure that does not exist
Here is where the record goes quiet. The only pay figure TikTok ever attached to the Creativity Program was comparative, and it did not arrive until that November, when the company told reporters creators could earn "up to 20 times the amount previously offered by the Creator Fund." That is a multiplier applied to an unpublished base, stated as a ceiling, with no method attached. It is not a rate.
We went looking for a defensible per-1,000-view figure for the Creativity Program Beta and could not find one. Not in Tubefilter's coverage, not in TechCrunch's, not in CBS's. What exists instead is a swarm of content-marketing blog posts quoting $0.50 to $1.00, or $1 to $5, or $4 to $8, none citing a source, disagreeing with each other by a factor of sixteen. That is not a range. That is an absence with numbers written on top of it.
So the honest entry in the table is UNDOCUMENTED. If you see a confident Creativity Program RPM anywhere, ask where it came from and watch what happens.
December 2023: the Creator Fund closes, quietly
On November 7, 2023, TikTok told Engadget and TechCrunch that the Creator Fund would be discontinued on December 16, 2023 in the US, UK, France and Germany, and that enrolled creators could upgrade to the Creativity Program. It stayed live in Italy and Spain.
Notice how that was communicated. There is no Newsroom post announcing the end of the Creator Fund. TikTok's own support page on the subject says only that "the TikTok Creator Fund is no longer available and has been replaced by the Creator Rewards Program." No date. No country list. The December 16 date that every article on the internet repeats, including this one, exists because reporters wrote down what a spokesperson emailed them.
TikTok has also never published what the Creator Fund actually paid out in total. CBS asked directly in November 2023 and did not get a number. A program announced with a billion-dollar headline ended without a receipt.
March 2024: Creator Rewards, and a formula with four names
TikTok announced the rename on stage at its For Creators: Future Formats Summit in Los Angeles on March 5, 2024, and posted it to the Newsroom on March 18, 2024. The Creativity Program was out of beta and became the Creator Rewards Program.
That Newsroom post was the first time TikTok named a formula at all. Rewards use "an optimized rewards formula" built on four metrics: originality, play duration, search value and audience engagement. Eligibility stayed put at 18 or older, 10,000 followers, 100,000 views in the last 30 days. Videos still have to run at least a minute.
"Search value" is the one worth pausing on. It is the only metric of the four that is about discovery rather than the video itself, and it says TikTok wants content that answers queries, not just content that performs in the feed. That is a YouTube-shaped incentive, stated plainly, in the only formula document TikTok has ever put out.
At the same summit TikTok offered two performance figures: total creator revenue up 250% over six months, and a doubling in the number of creators earning more than $50,000 a month from the program. Both are ratios. Neither has a published base. A 250% rise on an undisclosed number is a fact about direction and nothing else, and a doubling could be from four creators to eight.
Today, the Creator Rewards Program Terms for the US were last updated on July 20, 2026, and they still publish no rate and no per-view price. They say the operator, listed as TikTok USDS Joint Venture, "in its sole discretion, may reward Creators based on their contributions and the popularity of their Eligible Videos, including based on total legitimate video views and other signals." The EEA-facing terms, last updated in April 2025, are only slightly more forthcoming: rewards are "calculated dynamically based on the country of the video views origin, the number of video views, video engagement and authenticity of a video view."
The legal documents are not the whole picture, though, and this is where most write-ups stop too early. TikTok's Creator Academy, updated on August 18, 2026, goes considerably further than any of them. It splits a payout in two. The Standard Reward is the base, calculated on qualified views and weighted by where your viewers are and what language you post in. The Additional Reward is a bonus tied to how the video actually performs, on watch time, retention rate, completion rate and search value. TikTok says plainly that the two together are what set your RPM, which it defines as average gross revenue per 1,000 qualified views. The same pages publish the qualifying rules the Terms leave out: a view counts at five seconds, an "I'm not interested" tap cancels it, repeat views from one account collapse into a single view, search views need thirty seconds, and the program runs in eight countries, the United States, Mexico, Brazil, South Korea, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France.
So the disclosure has a very particular shape. TikTok will name every lever you can pull. It will not tell you what any lever is worth. Read all of it end to end and there is still not one dollar figure anywhere.
So the widely quoted $0.40 to $1.00 per 1,000 qualified views is a market estimate, aggregated from creator disclosures, and it is the figure this site's model uses. It is not TikTok's number and no honest write-up can call it one. We break down what it means for real monthly income in how much TikTok creators make, and set it against YouTube's very different economics in TikTok vs YouTube creator pay.
Estimate Your Creator Rewards EarningsWhat the pattern should tell you
Six years, three names, zero published rates. That is the shape of it, and it has practical consequences.
The eligibility bar is the stable part. Ten thousand followers and one hundred thousand views in thirty days have been the requirement since March 2021, through one program replacement and one rename. If you are planning around anything, plan around that. The TikTok Monetization Checker runs your numbers against Creator Rewards and TikTok's three other programs, including two that open far below 10,000 followers.
The format requirement is the second most stable thing. The one-minute floor has survived since February 2023 and is now written into the Program Terms. It is also the single change that reshaped who earns on TikTok at all.
The rate is the least stable thing, and it is not yours to know. A pooled, discretionary payout can be tuned down without an announcement, and the Creator Fund proved TikTok will let a per-view rate halve rather than publish it. Treat any Creator Rewards estimate, ours included, as a planning input with wide error bars rather than a price.
One practical warning about the numbers you are about to see. Our own calculator opens on the entertainment niche, which sits at the bottom of the pooled multiplier, so the default view shows roughly $0.26 to $0.65 per 1,000 qualified views rather than the headline $0.40 to $1.00. That is not a contradiction, it is what a low-value niche looks like inside the same model. Set your niche and audience mix before reading anything off it.
Run Your Own Numbers by NicheAnd the strategic read all three programs point to: TikTok's direct pay has never been the main event. Even at the top of the estimated range it takes millions of qualified views to match one mid-sized brand deal, which is why the creator fund model is best understood as a retention product rather than an income stream. The programs changed three times. The advice did not.
Frequently asked questions
When did the TikTok Creator Fund end?
December 16, 2023 in the US, UK, France and Germany, with the fund staying live in Italy and Spain. That date came from a TikTok statement given to Engadget and TechCrunch on November 7, 2023. TikTok's own support page confirms the fund is gone but gives no date and no country list, so the date every article repeats is press-documented rather than published by TikTok.
Is the Creativity Program the same as Creator Rewards?
Effectively yes. The Creativity Program launched as a beta in February 2023, and when it left beta in March 2024 TikTok renamed it the Creator Rewards Program. Same one-minute rule, same 10,000 follower and 100,000 view thresholds. The rename came with a stated four-metric formula: originality, play duration, search value and audience engagement. If a guide still says "Creativity Program," it was written before March 2024 or copied from something that was.
Why did TikTok replace the Creator Fund?
TikTok's stated reason is that it developed the replacement based on feedback from creators about its creator solutions, "including the TikTok Creator Fund." The creator-side explanation is more specific: the fund was a fixed pool, roughly $550,000 a day in the US by Hank Green's arithmetic, so per-view payouts fell as more creators joined. That second explanation is inference from the fund's structure rather than a TikTok statement, but it predicts the falling rates creators actually reported, and the replacement dropped the fixed-pot design.
How much did the TikTok Creator Fund pay per 1,000 views?
Creator-reported figures cluster around $0.02 to $0.05, and they fell over time. Hank Green reported roughly 5 cents per 1,000 views in 2020 dropping to about 2.5 cents by January 2022. TikTok never published a rate for the Creator Fund, and never published a total for what it paid out either, so there is no official figure to check those disclosures against.
Has TikTok ever published what Creator Rewards pays?
No. The Creator Rewards Program Terms for the US, last updated July 20, 2026, contain no rate and no per-view price. They say TikTok may reward creators at its "sole discretion" based on video popularity "and other signals." TikTok's Creator Academy goes further on mechanics, splitting a payout into a Standard Reward on qualified views and an Additional Reward earned by content quality, and defining RPM as average gross revenue per 1,000 qualified views. It still attaches no dollar figure to any of it. Every per-1,000-view figure in circulation, including the $0.40 to $1.00 range this site uses, is aggregated from creator disclosures.
Is the TikTok Creator Fund coming back?
Nothing suggests it. TikTok's support page states flatly that the fund has been replaced, and its design, a fixed pool paying on any video length, is exactly what the last two programs were built to move away from. The direction of travel across all three is toward longer content, discretionary pooled payouts and more qualifying conditions, not fewer.
Which TikTok program am I actually in?
If you started monetizing after March 2024, Creator Rewards, and there is nothing else to join for per-view pay. If you were in the Creator Fund and never upgraded, you are in nothing: enrolment closed with the fund. Creator Rewards takes a separate application, and the rules for which views count are stricter than anything the Creator Fund applied. Our TikTok Money Calculator covers what qualifies and what it is worth.
Sources: TikTok Newsroom on the $200M Creator Fund (July 22, 2020), the European Creator Fund launch (March 25, 2021), the Creativity Program Beta (February 20, 2023) and the Creator Rewards Program (March 18, 2024); the Creator Rewards Program Terms, US (last updated July 20, 2026), the Creator Rewards Program Terms, EEA (last updated April 2025), TikTok's Creator Fund update page, and Creator Academy on how rewards are calculated and the Additional Reward (both last updated August 18, 2026); Engadget and TechCrunch (both November 7, 2023) for the shutdown; CBS News (November 7, 2023) for creator disclosures; Tubefilter (January 24, 2022) for Hank Green's per-view figures and pool math, and Tubefilter again on the six-country expansion (September 15, 2023) and the rename (March 5, 2024); MobileSyrup (May 4, 2023) for US general availability. Verified against all of the above on August 30, 2026. Program names and rules change often; check TikTok's own pages before making decisions with money attached.
