Ramping up competition with Twitch, YouTube and other platforms, the new service will offer subscribers a range of perks including subscriber-only chat, custom emotes, badges and more.
This will allow creators to generate recurring revenue via payments from their top fans.
Sam O’Brien, CMO of performance marketing platform Affise believes TikTok is pivoting itself to become what Onlyfans originally envisioned and that content creation on social media will become a normalised career option for younger generations.
“OnlyFans was originally launched in November 2016 as a platform for performers to provide clips and photos to followers for a monthly subscription fee.
“However, becoming one of the most controversial social media platforms, OnlyFans allows creators to upload any kind of content, including porn, and lock it behind a paywall.
“TikTok’s subscription will allow creators to post photos, videos and text to the service for their followers to peruse locked behind a personal paywall- with access by charging.
“Whilst TikTok states it ‘does not allow nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit content’ on its platform, it has been reported that online users have found ways to bypass TikTok’s graphic content ban, by posting violent and sexual videos as their profile pictures.
“It is important that TikTok ensures its rules and regulations on pornography are clear to its users during the launch of its new subscription service and it clearly differentiates itself from pivoting in a similar direction to OnlyFans.
“TikTok has invited a broad variety of creators to try out subscriptions, including artists, vloggers, beauty experts, ASMR creators, Spanish-language creators, musicians, dancers and more. Each of them custom-designed their own emotes for use with subscriptions.
“Whilst this range of tested users will use the service to promote and endorse themselves and their products, it will be interesting to see how the other millions of TikTok users utilise and respond to the new service and whether it will be taken advantage of for alternative use.”
Sam O’Brien also talks about the fact TikTok is the main social media channel of Gen Z and subscription services can encourage content creators to use the app for partner marketing and business endorsements.
“Whilst the platform is used for partner marketing as a source of livelihood, subscription services may become more normalised as a "career option" for the younger generation.
“We can see that partner marketing is only going to keep growing as a channel, so for a brand to stay or become top of mind they'll have to really work with content creators, as well as content creators on TikTok presenting things more "as it is", as opposed to Instagram where content partnerships are still highly curated content.”