Is that algorithm really ‘For You’?

TikTok creators are finding out what BuzzFeed learned years ago

Late last week, a court upheld a law that—barring a surprise reprieve from the Supreme Court in January—will bring TikTok’s presence in the United States to an end.

TikTok’s exit will be a pain for its many millions of fans and addicts in the U.S., but it will hurt a lot more for the many creators who have built an audience on the platform. Those creators are learning a lesson that BuzzFeed learned in the late 2010s: never give the keys to your business to a drunk driver.

Through much of the 2010s, BuzzFeed was the most promising next-gen media company, amassing a huge audience and influence through its savvy use of Facebook, which, by 2016, catapulted its valuation to $1.7 billion. By 2018, however, Facebook’s deprioritization of media links in its News Feed tanked BuzzFeed’s audience—and, in the end, its business. BuzzFeed is now worth a tenth of what it once was.

The collective influence of creators today is more powerful than BuzzFeed’s in the 2010s, and yet they are vulnerable to the exact same problems. They cannot afford to bet their future on platforms whose rules—and sometimes even existence—waver with the winds.

The current wisdom for TikTok creators who are looking to avoid BuzzFeed’s fate is to spread their bets across various platforms. Diversification. Those who have seen the writing on the wall have been trying to grow audiences on YouTube, X, and Instagram, but on those platforms, too, the creator is subservient to the aggregator. The creators might have found diversity in venues, but not in the governing structures, all of which are rooted in the walled-garden status quo of the previous decade. The creator–consumer relationships in those places are ultimately at the mercy of the platforms, which means that creators’ businesses are too.

Being an online creator is not a frivolous pastime. For many, it’s a living. Or they hope it can be. The people attempting to build a livelihood on media platforms need more than just an algorithm that can make their content go viral from time to time. They need a way to gather and retain an audience, and to be able to consistently reach that audience over time without fear of being arbitrarily severed from it. They need stability and trust. They need ownership.

Unfortunately, true ownership for creators has been missing from the last era of media platforms. The rulers of those platforms have built powerful systems that let anyone make their voice heard, but they have tuned their economic engines to serve advertisers (and themselves) above all others. Even if creators can amass significant audiences there, the platform controls who sees what, when, and how often, and there’s no way to leave without losing access to the people who care about their work.

On Substack, creators own their content and their mailing list, guaranteeing that they can always connect directly with their community—even if they leave the platform. They also have a clear and reliable way to make money, from direct subscriptions. There is a powerful discovery system in Substack, with a social-media-like feed but with the twist that it’s designed entirely to help creators build their audience—a relationship that they own in the form of a mailing list that they can export whenever they want.

We’ve seen TikTok creators like

Violet Witchel

,

Coco Mocoe

, and

katie

of

the sunday stack

bring their communities from TikTok to Substack and discover economic autonomy, stability, and growth. Violet, who publishes under

Violet’s Substack

, joined Substack earlier this year and is already earning six figures from Substack alone. “Substack provides me with consistent income,” she told us. “One Substack post can bring in a significant number of new subscribers, providing a steady revenue stream compared to the variability of brand deals. It’s reaching a point where brand deals are less appealing, and focusing on Substack seems more sustainable.” We hope more TikTok creators will follow suit.

Creators shouldn’t need to worry about how forces far beyond their control might affect the stability of the platform on which they choose to build their livelihood. Their fate shouldn’t depend on the good graces of politically motivated legislators, the moods of judges, or the benevolence of an ad-based aggregator. They should take power into their own hands by building a home for their work, and their communities, that is invulnerable to the whims of the ruling elite and that gives them a revenue stream outside of advertising. In doing so, they can have more agency in their relationship with social media. They can then use social media opportunistically, maximizing their work’s reach while pulling people over to the place where they have stability and control.

In this TikTok transition, there is an opportunity for a shift in the internet’s power dynamics. It may be bad that the U.S. government is essentially forcing a large social media company to abandon the country, but it’s worse that creators have been conditioned to accept that their fate should be determined by those players.

Substack gives creators the power they deserve: the true independence of audience ownership.

Join a workshop to learn how to bring your audience from TikTok to Substack: