TikTok continues to develop new ways to help creators develop, with a view to increased monetization, this time via a new program called ‘Agency Center’, which, when activated, will signal to talent agencies that they’re open to additional guidance and support, where available. The new option, which is now available to some users within their TikTok LIVE settings, enables creators to tap through to the ‘Agency Center’ menu. There you can activate the ‘Agency invitation’ option, which, when switched on, will enable your TikTok profile to be ‘searched and invited by any agency’. You can also withdraw your interest whenever you choose.

LIVE Agencies will eventually be able to invite creators to join their network, where they will train, coach, and connect them with their community of experienced LIVE Creators, in order to improve their broadcasting approaches.

The program is still in development, but the idea is that it will enable creators to refine their live broadcasting strategy, which will then better enable them to build audience, and likely incorporate additional tools, like live shopping and promotions, into their streams.

Ultimately, the program is another element in TikTok’s broader effort to facilitate more monetization opportunities for its top creators, by helping them both improve their growth strategies and make connections within the app that can then help link them to new partnerships.

If TikTok wants to maintain its growth momentum, it needs to keep these popular users active – because if they stop uploading their content, and TikTok loses their engaged audiences, that, eventually, could be a disastrous blow for the app.

TikTok knows that its platform could witness the same fate as Vine, and even though it’s now far bigger than Vine ever was, the vultures are circling, with both Meta and YouTube now offering bigger, more sustainable, more reliable monetization processes. And creators are indeed starting to question whether it’s worth them sticking around TikTok at all.

It’s not at critical levels yet, of course, with TikTok still the trending app of the moment. But it will become a bigger question, especially as TikTok’s audience continues to grow, and that, inevitably, reduces payments from its static Creator Fund.

For smaller creators, that probably won’t matter, but if you rely on your uploads for income, and your TikTok payouts vary significantly each month, based on the whims of the Creator Fund program, that will become a problem at some stage.