<b>Platform creator funds: the per-view rate is designed to decay</b>

<b>Platform creator funds: the per-view rate is designed to decay</b>

Thesis: fixed-pool creator funds mathematically guarantee falling per-view payouts as the platform grows, and several funds' own mechanics confirm this.

Context: first-generation funds (the original TikTok Creator Fund being the most-studied) allocated a roughly fixed budget across a growing pool of eligible views. Independent creator logs from 2021-2023 tracked the effective rate falling from the low cents-per-thousand range toward fractions of a cent.

Findings: across these logs the pattern was consistent — early entrants reported higher effective rates; the rate compressed as eligibility widened. Newer revenue-share programs (Creativity Program, YouTube Shorts share) changed the math by tying pay to ad revenue rather than a fixed pot, which removes the structural decay but adds ad-market volatility.

Caveats: these are individual dashboards, not platform-audited figures, and creators rarely normalize for watch-time, region or content category, all of which the funds weight.

Implications: treat any fixed-pool fund as a declining asset; revenue-share programs are more durable but track the ad market.

What we still don't know: platforms don't publish per-view payout curves, so decay rates are reconstructed, not observed.