Communications Minister Solly Malatsi has asked TikTok to let South African creators join its Creator Rewards Programme, which pays creators for views on their videos.

Local creators are currently excluded, and Malatsi told eNCA his department had met TikTok's vice president and raised the concerns of South African creators, calling the exclusion a form of economic exclusion.

It’s the second time he has pushed the issue, after asking TikTok to extend its earlier Creator Fund to South Africa in March 2025.

TikTok's published support material names only a handful of markets for Creator Rewards, mostly the US, the UK, larger Western European countries, Japan, South Korea and Brazil. No African country is among them.

Even where it is available, creators need to be over 18, have at least 10,000 followers, reach 100,000 views in the previous 30 days and post original videos longer than a minute.

Malatsi's argument is that South African creators often start trends that creators elsewhere copy and get paid for. He also said he was not interested in the alternatives TikTok offered, including its gifting programme, where viewers buy virtual items with TikTok Coins and send them during live streams.

The platform's reach here makes the case harder to dismiss. Datareportal counts 29.1 million adult users in South Africa at the end of 2025, and TikTok's ads reached 56.4% of the local internet user base, 2.5 points more than Facebook. Its potential ad reach grew by 7.27 million people in a year.

MyBroadband's Myles Illidge reported Malatsi's comments and set them against TikTok's growth, noting it has overtaken Facebook on reach in two years after ranking second in the 2023 Social Media Landscape Study. eNCA carried the interview in which Malatsi said South Africa is asking for the same treatment creators get in the US and UK.

Look at the two numbers together. TikTok now reaches more South African internet users than Facebook does, and that audience is what advertisers here pay for. The creators producing the content that holds the audience cannot earn from the programme that shares ad revenue with creators elsewhere.

TikTok has not said why, and the question about what South African viewers are worth is the right one to keep asking.

For local businesses, the practical point is that brand deals, not the platform, are what fund South African creators. If you market through TikTok creators, you are effectively their main income source, which gives you leverage and some responsibility.

It’s also the familiar platform lesson, the same one behind WhatsApp's new per-message fees and Apple's link-out commission: the platform sets the terms, and a minister asking nicely is the only lever South Africa currently has.

You might also like our piece on X showing users which governments limited their posts, Australia's algorithm opt-out laws, and the EU's proposed under-13 social media ban.

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