TikTok's Creator Rewards Program: who can join and what earns

TikTok lists these requirements for the Creator Rewards Program:

• You are based in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, South Korea, France, Mexico or Brazil, with an account registered there.
• Your account is a personal account. Business accounts, organisations and political or government accounts do not qualify.
• You are at least 18 years old.
• You have at least 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views in the last 30 days.
• Your account is in good standing and public, and you post original content.

If you have a business account, you can switch it to a personal one in Settings and privacy, then Account; TikTok says you can apply to the program 30 days after switching.

Being in the program does not make every video count. TikTok's rules for a video:

• It is original, high-quality content over a minute long.
• It gets at least 1,000 views on the For You feed.
• It is not a Duet or a Stitch, and not made with Photo Mode.
• It is not an ad, a paid promotion or sponsored content.

Videos that are deleted or set to private are dropped from the program and their rewards are not paid. TikTok also describes an Additional Reward for videos that are well crafted, engaging and specialised in a niche, and asks for 1080p or higher.

TikTok reviews accounts from time to time and looks at the account and its recent videos for these problems, among others:

• Unoriginal content: copied from others, or with minimal original input or edits.
• Low quality: split screens, meaningless reactions, low-quality images or slide videos.
• Personal or business contact details in the profile, and clickbait with no real value.
• Inappropriate or disturbing content, and suspicious activity such as artificial engagement.

An account with 5 video violations in the past 30 days is ineligible, and 5 account violations in total make it permanently ineligible.

You can appeal an ineligible video within 80 days, from the video itself or from the Creator Rewards dashboard in TikTok Studio. An account that has been disqualified can appeal within 30 days, from the notification in your inbox or from TikTok Studio.

TikTok says account appeals are reviewed within up to 14 days, and that an account with 5 or more ineligible videos in 30 days may be disqualified, so appealing videos that were wrongly flagged can help keep it in. You may appeal once per disqualification, and TikTok suggests adding pictures of how you made the video.

Two of TikTok's rules matter most for a faceless channel. Videos must be over a minute long, so a 45-second short earns nothing from the program however well it does. And the account review names slide videos and low-quality images as low quality, so a channel of still pictures with a voice over them is exactly what that review is looking at.

What the rules reward is the opposite: your own idea and script, a voice that fits it, pictures that move and change with the story, and videos long enough to count. Using AI for the pictures or the voice is not what TikTok rules out; copying and mass-producing is.

If you live in Egypt, Spain, Portugal or anywhere else outside the list, the Creator Rewards Program is not open to you. TikTok LIVE Gifts is a separate feature with its own rules:

• You live in a location where LIVE Gifts is available.
• You are 18 or older (19 in South Korea), and TikTok may ask you to confirm your age before you go LIVE.
• You are eligible to go LIVE, and your account is in good standing.

TikTok's article does not list the locations, so check the LIVE settings in the app. Other platforms pay in more places: Facebook's content monetisation runs in about 70 countries, Egypt and Spain among them, and our guide to it has the details.