As a possible ban on the popular video app TikTok gets closer, content creators are preparing for a source of revenue to disappear.
“I’ve already started to focus more on Instagram and YouTube than I have anything else,” said Justin Carmona, who lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
Carmona has nearly 1 million followers on TikTok, where he shares his bartending knowledge.
“Most people have already realized that you have to diversify your outreach to other platforms as well,” Carmona said. “I honestly feel as if almost every person who is monetized on TikTok has already learned their lesson, knowing that they can’t put all their eggs in one basket.”
TikTok asked a federal appeals court Monday to bar the Biden administration from enforcing the law, which could lead to a ban, until the Supreme Court reviews its challenge to the statute.
The legal filing was made after a panel of three judges on the same court sided with the government last week and ruled the law, which requires TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest its stakes in the social media company or face a ban, was constitutional.
If the law is not overturned, both TikTok and its parent ByteDance, which is also a plaintiff in the case, have claimed the popular app will shut down by Jan. 19.
TikTok has more than 170 million American users who would be affected, the companies have said.
In their legal filing on Monday, attorneys for the two companies wrote that even if a shutdown lasted one month, it would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S.
The company would also lose 29% of its total “targeted global” advertising revenue for next year as well as talent, since current and prospective employees would look elsewhere for jobs, they wrote.
“If TikTok were to disappear tomorrow, yeah, that would be a revenue source gone,” Carmona said.
The app has been good to him.
One time Carmona even pulled in $11,000 in one month, mostly because he posted a TikTok video that generated more than 30 million views.
But Carmona said he’s “been prepared from day one” for the app to vanish some day.
“It’s kind of sad, but we all know that it just could disappear overnight,” Carmona said. “We’ve always been prepared — the day is inevitable.”
It’s not clear if the Supreme Court will take up the case. But some legal experts have said the justices are likely to weigh in on the case since it raises novel issues about social media platforms and how far the government could go in its stated aims of protecting national security.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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