A TikTok ban looms. Creators say they’ll believe it when they see it.

TikTok last said that it has 170 million U.S. users and that its creators would lose almost $300 million in earnings a month if the ban goes through. (File Photo: Reuters)
TikTok last said that it has 170 million U.S. users and that its creators would lose almost $300 million in earnings a month if the ban goes through. (File Photo: Reuters)

Summary

Status-quo videos are still proliferating on the Chinese-owned app. Madison Avenue remains upbeat just weeks before potential U.S. ban.

Sarah Perl is adamant that TikTok isn’t getting banned—so much so that the full-time content creator isn’t making any backup plans.

“It’s nothing other than business as usual for me," said the 23-year-old from Los Angeles, who has spent four years making lifestyle content for her followers on the platform, which now number 2.5 million.

Perl, who sells two products directly on TikTok and uses it to promote her coaching services, said she credits the app with enabling her to become a millionaire shortly after college.

She and other creators, brands and advertisers are blazing ahead with their businesses on TikTok even as the Chinese-owned app faces a congressionally mandated ban in the U.S. within weeks, barring a last-minute intervention.

Lawyers for TikTok and its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, want the federal law overturned, and they have asked the Supreme Court to suspend the ban while they appeal a lower-court ruling upholding it. President-elect Donald Trump fueled hopes for an intervention just after Christmas when he asked the high court to stop the law from taking effect Jan. 19 as scheduled so he can pursue a solution to prevent a shutdown.

Meanwhile, users are taking an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it approach as they continue posting dance videos, promoting products from TikTok Shop and telling personal stories while getting ready to go out for the evening.

Mylen Yamamoto Tansingco, chief executive and founder of the Los Angeles talent-management firm Clique-Now, said creators’ anxiety regarding the possibility of a TikTok ban feels tepid these days compared with when the legislation was introduced in March.

“Back then, we worked around the clock with our talent to download content and repurpose it across other platforms," she said. “The anxious calls coming in about the TikTok ban this time around is zero to none."

Marketers on Madison Avenue are shrugging off the potential disappearance of their go-to place to reach Gen Zers and millennials.

“This has been going on for a really long time. Chances are, it will get postponed again," said Jeremy Cornfeldt, president of the digital-ad firm Tinuiti. “We’ve been stuck in an endless state of limbo."

The law creating the existential threat to TikTok in the U.S.—which President Biden signed in April—requires that the app be sold to a non-Chinese buyer or face a ban. The Chinese government indicated that it wouldn’t allow a forced sale of the app. TikTok and ByteDance then sued to stop the ban from taking effect. A federal appeals court ruled against TikTok last month, and the Supreme Court has since agreed to hear oral arguments Jan. 10—nine days before the ban is scheduled to start.

TikTok users and advertisers have said they have been through this process before. In 2020, then-President Trump tried to ban the app through executive order, which was blocked by the courts. ByteDance spent much of the next few years trying to negotiate a deal with regulators that never materialized.

Then came the regulatory effort in the form of last year’s law, which passed with strong support from both Republicans and Democrats who were convinced that the app’s Chinese ownership represents a national-security threat.

TikTok exploded in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic and continued to grow until early 2024, both in users and influence.

The company last said that it has 170 million U.S. users and that its creators would lose almost $300 million in earnings a month if the ban goes through. On the advertising side, TikTok accounts for around 4% of the digital-ad market in the U.S., according to estimates from eMarketer.

While the involvement of Trump and the Supreme Court have given some TikTok users hope, legal scholars said it isn’t necessarily a good sign for the app. The court might affirm the federal appeals court’s ruling, said Genevieve Lakier, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.

Two House members wrote last month to the chief executives of Apple and Google, reminding them that they have to comply with the requirements of the law—taking TikTok off their app stores—by Jan. 19.

To some, like Perl, TikTok is simply too important to creators’ livelihoods and too beloved by its users to go away. “We’re going to find a way to make it work," she said.

Humphrey Yang, 37, a TikTok creator in the San Francisco area with 3.3 million followers, said he wasn’t fretting.

“It seems like a waste of energy to prepare if we don’t know if it’s going to happen yet or not," he said, adding that he isn’t entirely dependent on TikTok for his income anyway. “I am remaining a little skeptical because you just don’t know till you know."

Even if the ban does take effect, Yang, who makes personal finance and investing explainers, expects the TikTok app to continue functioning for a while. “The people that have it on their phones will still have it," he said.The law doesn’t require U.S. residents to delete the app from their phones. But removing it from Google’s and Apple’s app stores will prevent TikTok from sending updates for the app, making it buggy and unusable over time. The law also bars U.S. internet hosting services from supporting the platform.

The prevailing attitude among many advertisers is that they will shift ad dollars if and when the ban actually takes effect. They said the yearslong, on-again, off-again saga of a potential TikTok ban has dulled any real sense of urgency.

Still, many ad agencies have contingency plans, drafted long ago. The playbooks map out where ad dollars would shift in a worst-case scenario—likely to rival platforms such as Instagram and YouTube.

Yamamoto Tansingco of Clique-Now said her firm was still fielding requests for TikTok campaigns for the first quarter of this year, but is considering setting those up to launch well before Jan. 19, just in case.

While many TikTok creators are carrying on with the status quo, Kalita Hon isn’t.

She is so sure that TikTok is going to be banned this time that she started making more-casual, off-the-cuff videos of her talking directly to the camera in addition to her usual more edited, planning-intensive fashion content.

“I usually never make videos like that," said Hon, 23. “But if it’s getting banned, I might as well just say what’s on my mind."

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com, Sarah E. Needleman at Sarah.Needleman@wsj.com and Suzanne Vranica at Suzanne.Vranica@wsj.com

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