TikTok creators bemoan an app where “overnight” success is possible.

For online sensation Erica Thompson, TikTok is the most powerful social media platform for educating her 11 million followers about her life’s passion: bees.

The loss of the US platform – made more likely after the Supreme Court upheld the ban, which is due to take effect next week – will be “substantial” financially for Ms Thompson, a beekeeper from Texas, but it is also a loss of educational tool.

“There are many other people on the platform who offer educational or informative content,” she told the BBC. “That’s the biggest loss, and that’s what we have to focus on, beyond the financial aspect, is the loss that we as a society — the people who use TikTok — will certainly feel.”

About 170 million Americans use the app and website. Unless China-based parent company ByteDance sells the platform or intervention comes from the executive branch, the platform will stop operating in the US on Sunday.

The fate of the social media giant was left in the hands of the US Supreme Court after lawmakers from both the Democratic and Republican parties voted to ban the video-sharing app last year over concerns about its ties to the Chinese government and concerns that the app was national security risk.

TikTok has repeatedly said it does not share information with Beijing.

But users and content creators say the social media platform has become an integral part of society — and helped regular users capture the limelight with millions of followers. It quickly became the social media of choice for some and a key source of income for others.

Now they are worried about what will happen if the ban is not stopped.

Creators who make a living from social media apps have told the BBC that TikTok is the superior platform.

That was true for Ms. Thomspon, whose first TikTok video received more than 50 million views in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

“I haven’t had the same success on other platforms,” ​​she said. “I can post the exact same video on Instagram, for example, and not get even close to an engagement.”

Ross Smith, who shares funny videos with his 98-year-old grandmother to more than 24 million followers on TikTok, describes it as one of the few platforms where it’s easy to become a creator.

On TikTok, he said, “you can be an overnight success.”

Other platforms trying to replicate the short-form scrolling format featured on TikTok have yet to succeed, Mr Smith told the BBC. Mrs. Thompson agreed.

“I rarely hear about people going viral on Instagram or someone being an Instagram sensation, but those are words you hear a lot on TikTok,” Ms Thompson said.

Cody James, a fashion influencer with tens of thousands of followers on TikTok, told the BBC that audiences don’t necessarily switch from one platform to another.

“I know a guy who has hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok and maybe only ten thousand followers on Instagram,” Mr James told the BBC.

Many content creators survive on the income they earn on TikTok.

Some told the BBC that their lives would change dramatically without the platform.

When brands and companies want ad content from a creator, they want the creators to post on TikTok, Nicole Bloomgarden, a fashion designer and artist, told the BBC.

“Indirectly, TikTok has been the majority of my revenue because all the brands want their stuff promoted on the app,” Ms Bloomgarden said.

It’s not clear statistically whether TikTok is the most lucrative source of income for creators, but many told the BBC it made up a significant portion of their income.

2022 survey from the creator-focused startup Linktreefound that about 12% of full-time creators make more than $50,000 a year from their social media platforms.

About 46 percent said they made less than $1,000, the survey of 9,500 people found.

This isn’t the first time a major social media platform has disappeared.

In 2017 Vine, a platform where users could share videos up to six seconds long, has shut down.

For artists at the time, this was a shock.

Q Park, a content creator with 37.7 million followers on TikTok, was one of those people.

He spent years building a following on Vine — the only platform he was using at the time — and when it disappeared, he said, “it felt like my whole business was coming to a halt.”

But in some ways it was good for him too. This forced him to learn how to create different content for different audiences.

“This experience showed me that if you have faith in your ability to create content, you will build a following somewhere else,” Mr Park told the BBC.

As the ban approaches, some creators have started flocking to another Chinese platform, RedNote – a TikTok competitor popular among young people in China, Taiwan and other Mandarin-speaking populations.

RedNote was the most downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store earlier this week.

While some creators are diversifying where they post in hopes of growing audiences elsewhere, others hope the ban doesn’t come to pass.

“TikTok is a beast,” Park said. “Part of me thinks it might be too big to fail.”

“It’s going to pick up somehow, it’s too big an economy now.”

Additional reporting by Grace Dean and Natalie Jimenez.