Disney × TikTok
Living in a world with an unlimited supply of content
Disney and TikTok announced, maybe, a first-of-its-kind this week.
(my source was an Inc article by Victoria Salves, you can read it here)
The deal, in short:
Disney is opening up its IP catalogue (Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, FX, the whole vault) for TikTok creators to make short-form content with.
Creators opt in, get access to an official library of Disney assets, and the work they produce will live both on TikTok itself and inside Disney+’s new Verts tab (their YouTube Shorts-style vertical video feed that launched earlier this year).
Pilots in the US first, other markets to follow.
For context on how unusual this is: other streamers have flirted with vertical video inside their apps. But this is the first time native TikTok content is going to be displayed on an outside platform. TikTok’s content is being licensed into one of the biggest streamers in the world.
And on paper, this is what everyone in the creator space has been asking for.
Access to major IP, sanctioned collaboration with a top-tier studio, distribution on a platform hundreds of millions of people already open every day.
If you’d have described this deal to a Disney fan-creator in 2019, they’d have thought you were describing a fever dream.
But… read the deal carefully and there’s a very obvious thing missing.
The press release talks about a “bigger stage.” Disney’s CMO uses phrases like “a new bridge between the stories we tell and the creativity they inspire.” Both true. What neither he nor the deal itself talks about is compensation. Creator economy expert Lia Haberman wrote in the Inc article: “they are essentially an unpaid labour force.”
Disney has a obscenely large audience that already loves its IP. TikTok has an obscenely large population of creators who will make content about Disney IP whether Disney lets them or not - this has been happening organically for a decade. What this deal does is take that already-existing organic behaviour, wrap a light layer of official sanctioning around it (better assets, official templates, maybe a Disney+ placement if you’re good), and use it to feed both TikTok’s engagement metrics and Disney+’s content library.
Neither of which, notably, comes with a cheque attached to the person making the video.
This is Disney figuring out how to industrialise fan content at scale (content that used to happen for free anyway) and TikTok building the operational pipes to do it efficiently. The clever part, from the two corporations’ point of view, is that both sides get exactly what they want.
Disney gets what Haberman calls “an almost unlimited supply of content” for their new Verts tab, without commissioning any of it. TikTok gets more engagement, more time spent, and crucially a much stickier reason for creators to keep producing on-platform.
Now, I want to be fair here, because it’s easy to slide into cynicism.
There is value being offered to creators in this deal.
Access to sanctioned Disney assets is not nothing
Getting placed on Disney+ is not nothing
Being an early participant in a first-of-its-kind program is not nothing
Some creators will absolutely convert this exposure into careers. If you’re a small fan-creator, this is a legitimate opportunity and I’d probably tell you to take it.
But that individual case doesn’t undo what’s happening at the systems level.
For a while, the direction of travel felt encouraging. Creators were getting more leverage, they were getting paid better, owning more of their audience, more of their IP, more of their upside.
Deals like this Disney × TikTok feel like attempts to move the pendulum back the other way.
Not for the top-tier creators, who will negotiate directly and get paid. But for the vast middle-tier of the creator economy (fan editors, hobbyists, the enthusiast community that makes 90% of the content people consume) the pitch is starting to look uncomfortably familiar.
Make content for us for free. In return we’ll give you exposure and access to our stuff.
Where have we heard that one before?
The Starbucks / TikTok “Green Apron” partnership Haberman also references in the article is all about TikTok formalising the pipeline for content that Starbucks employees were making anyway, monetising it upward, and offering the employees enough of a taste that the flow keeps going.
Haberman’s phrase for it is “operationalising the supply chain of employees.”
That’s a very sharp bit of language.
But… is this Disney deal is doing exactly the same thing?
What do I think about it?
First: if you’re a creator with an existing Disney fandom and this program looks like it could in fact accelerate you, take the opportunity. Just go in with clear eyes about what you’re trading.
You’re contributing to a content pipeline that has enormous commercial value for two of the biggest companies in the world, and your compensation is exposure and access.
Second: the fact that a deal like this can be announced in 2026, with no meaningful compensation model attached, and still get treated as unambiguously good news for creators, tells you how much work the creator economy still has to do on itself. The infrastructure for compensating creators fairly on brand-and-platform partnerships remains underdeveloped.
Lia Haberman’s forecast in the article is that this becomes an issue for creators “once fans have worked their way through all the assets and there’s no clout or exclusive nature to the content they’re able to produce. But that’s probably a couple of years down the line.”
I think she’s right, and I think the couple-of-years window is exactly the window in which someone should be building the infrastructure to fix it. Because when the clout fades (and it always fades) the creators are gonna notice they got a bit of a raw deal.
Remember, the creator mindset is all you need to grow 🌱
Jordan
P.S.
When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help out 👇️
P.P.S
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