Dear User,
So, I just did a thing. A bloody civil war has broken out in my Tiktok comments, again, and I fear I’m about to be assassinated along with all of my flatmates (and I have five!). What da heck! All because I made a text post that the masses have labelled ‘millennial coded’. This adulting thing is harder than I thought. Anyway, before I start another mutiny… Here are le numbers:
Twitter followers: 332
Instagram followers: 1,100
Tiktok followers: 10,708
At least the polls are more split about this one than my crying post. It began with the same dogpile: one person left a comment on my post about how millennial it sounded (I’m literally nineteen) and then everybody started to take up the chant, like an angry mob. Quickly, this spread to my other posts, most of which didn’t even have my words in them. It was a total hive mind… Normal people scare me.
After a few days of this, I started to get some defenders, some white knights. I’m not sure why they bothered to pull me out of the gulag (tbf that one post did sound pretty millennial… I accused someone of not getting my ‘dark’ humour). Soon my comment section was a war zone. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the new followers I got were from pity, and the other half were from users just wanting to keep up with the drama. I. can’t. even.
Want to know what the post that started it all read? Well, tough chips. It would ruin my reputation with you as well as the rest of the internet. Plus, a Hufflepuff never spills the beans.
I moustache you a question: is half of your subscriber count being from hate followers a loss if it got you into the Creator Fund? Hurr durr, call me crazy, but I consider that a win. So what about the money? We need to talk about this.
The eligibility for the Tiktok Creator Fund is that ‘users must be 18 years or older’ and:
‘meet a minimum following threshold of 10K authentic followers, have accrued at least 100K authentic video views in the last 30 days, and post original videos in line with our Community Guidelines.’
(https://www.tiktok.com/creators/creator-portal/en-us/getting-paid-to-create/creator-fund/)
Well, call me Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanov and count me eligible, because I’m about to make some royal cash! Or, so I thought. Podcast host Descript claims on their blog that:
TikTok pays between $0.02 and $0.04 per 1,000 views through the Creator Fund program. If you do the math, that’s $20 to $40 for a million views.
My 100,000 views earned me an entire eleven Great British pounds (eleven-twenty-six to be exact). Because that makes sense. Talk about taking advantage! I just sold my soul for two tinnies in Sleazys. At this rate my millennial grey penthouse in the Hollywood Hills is thousands of years and millions of successful posts away. Maybe the Bolsheviks were right, after all. I’ll have to figure out a new strategy.
So, User, what lesson did we learn today? Beg for big bands from the big brands? Someone else will always be willing to do it for cheaper. Revolt and swear off social media altogether? Not if they’re still spoon feeding us ambition. Burn down the houses of parliament? No, no, that’s next month. Tiktok benefits from making it look easy to blow up and get rich, but in truth, once you start taking it seriously, your bubble gets popped before you can say ‘Peace, Land, and Bread’. We’re supposed to believe it’s a privilege to earn money from our work, just because it’s entertainment. I guess, in some ways, it is. I’d much rather scrape by on earnings from my silly posts than work a fourteen hour shift waitressing, with one measly thirty minute break. But should those be the only two options? Am I employing a hate following for the dopamine wage of consuming my content, so I can earn pennies for the benefit of the bigshots at Tiktok HQ? And when did this article become about the abolition of the big tech monarchy, over skinny jeans and side parts?
I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, so I’ll leave you to make up your own conclusions, while I wash my mouth out of all this millennial slang.
Remember, User, you never heard any of this from me.
XoXo, and all my parasocial love,
Mini Disc ❤
(PRJCT_MINI.DSC is a monthly column by Ophelia Po, exclusive to qmunicatemagazine.co.uk. Stay tuned for more installments!)
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