Wisconsin TikTok creators feel uncertain of future as ban is postponed

Kimberly Mozuch of Stevens Point started making TikTok videos almost by accident. She was in a photography workshop, taking pictures of soap bubbles freezing in the cold winter air.

“And I was like, hey, what if we did videos of this?” she said. “And then I started posting them, because they were so beautiful.”

Those videos got millions of views.

Now, the popular, Chinese-owned video-sharing app faces an uncertain future. President Donald Trump ordered the executive branch yesterday to delay enforcing a Congress– and Supreme Court-backed TikTok ban for 75 days.

For Wisconsin creators, that means more questions about what will come next.

Mozuch called TikTok “a more fair, even platform” than other popular social media apps like Instagram or Facebook.

“Instagram, you have to be a supermodel or famous before you get there,” she said. “You can just be anyone on TikTok.”

TikTok can be an important source of income to small businesses

The uncertainty around TikTok comes at a difficult time for Mozuch. She recently lost her husband, and the bar they owned together is facing financial issues. A TikTok ban would mean one fewer source of income.

She said she’s made as much as $940 in a month from participating in TikTok’s Creator Fund, which pays dividends to video creators based on their views and engagement.

Many small businesses also rely on TikTok for customers. One of them is Milweb1, a vinyl sign shop in Franklin run by Nick Christiansen.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a teacher with a popular TikTok account asked Christiansen to make social distancing floor decals for his school.

“They ended up making tons of videos on me, putting them around, and it just became insane. People just started following me just off of that,” he said.

Christiansen started making his own videos to promote his shop. When the app introduced the TikTok Shop online shopping feature, his sales grew even more.

“I had to hire more people, and we had to redevelop a whole new website for the amount of traffic we were getting,” he said.

TikTok ended up providing about 30 percent of his total customer traffic. He says he could recoup that loss by promoting on other social media sites. But sites like Facebook charge a fee for boosting your business’s posts.

Without TikTok, Christiansen said he “might have to spend a lot of money to get that same kind of organic reach that you don’t have to pay for.”

Making videos is a passion project for creators

Blending entertainment and sales into one video is difficult, Christiansen said.

“Especially on a subject matter like vinyl banners or yard signs. That’s such a boring subject in general,” he added.

But he said it’s fun making the videos: montages of his workday, overlaid with stream-of-consciousness musings, punctuated by the sounds of box cutters and hole punchers.

Mozuch said her videos show the world that beautiful things can happen in Wisconsin’s biting cold: frosty patterns creeping over ephemeral, quivering bubbles.

“A lot of places don’t get cold enough to ever experience that,” she said.

Between the court’s decision and Trump’s order, the app went dark for U.S. users over the weekend. As of Tuesday afternoon, it works again for existing users, but cannot be downloaded from app stores by new users.