
As a potential TikTok ban looms, thousands of actors are left wondering what could happen to their content and sense of community if the app goes dark. For years, performers have banded together under the hashtag #ActorTok to document their journeys in the industry and share advice on how to break in.
“TikTok allowed actors who were just aspiring people watching from the sidelines to feel like they were in the game in the industry, even if they really weren’t,” says Christine Horn, an actor and influencer who has amassed over 131,000 followers on the app.
Nearly every performer who spoke to Backstage for this piece agreed: None of them were using the app to get discovered or book traditional acting jobs. As James Tang, a TikTok user with over 741,000 followers, explains, the dream of getting a three-picture deal from Netflix, like the one TikTok star Addison Rae got in 2021, is an outlier. “[For] the majority of us, [the app] wasn’t changing our careers and lives,” he says. “And for the people [who] were booking roles, it seemed like they were also pursuing things in the traditional industry,” namely film and television.
So, if fear of losing establishment jobs isn’t the primary concern, what is? For some content creators, there is a financial component to losing a platform like TikTok, where they’ve been able to make money off different content types including user generated content (UGC). “The TikTok ban will primarily impact actors who are active creators on the platform, especially those who have been monetizing their presence through TikTok Shop, brand partnerships, and sponsored content,” says Heidi Dean, a social media marketing expert for actors. “For actors with large, engaged followings, this could mean losing a key source of income and visibility.”
Sarah Pribis, an actor, writer, producer, and TikTok influencer with 268,000 followers, is one of those people; she says the app brings in at least a quarter of her income. “I made over $5,000 last month just from the [TikTok] Creator Fund,” says Pribis. Typically, she averages about $1,500 to $3,000 a month from the site, not counting UGC and brand deals—and 75% of her brand deals come from TikTok versus Instagram. “It’s given actors a survival job that is creative, that is flexible,” she says of the app’s impact.
What are the alternatives to TikTok?
Those who want to be proactive ahead of any potential ban are now in the position of deciding where to go next. “TikTok is the quick dopamine hit,” says Horn. “The viewership is quicker, the [highly curated] ‘For You’ page, the communities rallying around certain hashtags or trends… It helps videos get noticed much faster.” And Gen Z has specifically found that TikTok’s rapid nature and the ability to remain anonymous despite having millions of followers is more comforting than other, millennial-friendly apps like Instagram and YouTube.
Those who spoke to Backstage agreed that Instagram and YouTube are the two apps they’d most likely start using in place of TikTok. “YouTube is really a long game,” says Horn. “It’s a long-term investment. The video you put out five years ago can all of a sudden get popular.”
“YouTube Shorts is where it’s at right now,” adds Dean. “Many actors who’ve been thriving on TikTok are venturing over to Shorts, if they haven’t already. It’s a natural transition because the format is the same, the video editor is similar, and YouTube offers a huge built-in audience for creators. As for Instagram, I believe many actors have been slow to fully embrace vertical video, even though Instagram Reels has been around for over four years. A lot of actors are still focused on posting photos and landscape videos. I expect we’ll see TikTok actors migrating to Instagram Reels in larger numbers, and hopefully that will encourage other actors who’ve been hesitant about video to start using Reels, too.”
Tang is already cross-posting on other social media platforms and sees YouTube as a solid replacement because its horizontal videos still yield the highest potential payout rates. YouTube also gives him the opportunity to flex his filmmaking skills. Pribis, similarly, is working on building her brand on YouTube by posting the same type of content there that she has on TikTok. As for Instagram, she notes that she’d be more judicious about what to post on the app, since her friends, family, and potential employers all use Instagram more than TikTok.
Andrew Bova, an actor with nearly 50,000 followers on TikTok, is still trying to figure out a backup plan, but knows he’ll have to change how he approaches content, much like Pribis. “One of the biggest things that TikTok has forced me to think about is, how am I going to change my content? How is that going to function on the platform? How can I tailor it to the new platform that I’m going to tackle next or that I’m going to continue growing?”
Dean advises that anyone interested in starting from scratch on a new platform should be sure to download their TikTok content immediately, “either directly from the app or using a tool like Repurpose.io, which can automatically save your videos to Dropbox or Google Drive without a watermark,” and use that to start a consistent posting schedule on another platform.
The future of TikTok is still unclear, as some government officials have sought to delay the ban deadline. Regardless, every actor understands that this is the nature of the beast: to set up shop, work hard for a while, and then move on to the next thing. As Bova says, the goal of being on TikTok as an actor was never about “getting super big numbers off the bat. It’s about building that community and about showing up consistently—a lot like auditioning.”