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TikTok helped create a new culture of virtual stars. But the short-form video app is still in the early stages of publishing features that allow its creators to make money, a step to prevent its top influencers from switching to apps with more mature monetization systems like YouTube and Instagram.
The company announced this week that it’s setting aside $200 million to pay creators who are “seeking opportunities to foster a livelihood through their innovative content.” But it has yet to introduce some of the standard money-making tools for creators that are available on other platforms.
TikTok lately offers a “virtual gifts” feature, which allows authors to make money while broadcasting live by receiving virtual “gifts” from enthusiasts that can be exchanged for cash. The company has created a marketplace of authors to help its users more easily cling to sponsored publications traded out of application. And TikTok recently tested a buy button feature for some of its top users (a product somewhat aligned with Instagram’s buying tools) to a limited extent.
But many creators hoping to make a living with TikTok don’t rely on the app’s built-in monetization capabilities, relying on external logo agreements, paid music integrations, and, more recently, app marketing.
Influencers and marketers told Business Insider that an unmarried TikTok app promotion can generate tens of thousands of profits for a creator.
“I’ve been building apps for about 4 weeks, and it’s a game changer,” said Reagan Yorke, a 19-year-old student who recently earned tens of thousands of dollars to announce the Group’s video chat app for $2.5 million. TikTok followers.
Yorke worked with corporate marketing application Yoke, which she with a follow-up link to upload in her TikTok biography that would give her credits for all the application facilities she made from her account. On June 14, she released a video selling Bunch to her subscribers, and the video took off, generating 11.5 million video views, 2.5 million likes and 531,000 shares to date.
“I literally posted it right before I went to sleep,” Yorke said. “I woke up the next day and I had like $20,000 in my account, so I was just like, is this real?”
Yorke told Business Insider that he will pay a fee of 70 cents for each of the downloads he makes.
“If you promote an app that your audience is going to like, they’ll trust you more,” she said.
Creators Bobthrough Moore, 17, and Eloise Fouladgar, 22, of UK-based TikTok, are also Yoke to make money from app marketing by releasing videos that direct their millions of subscribers to traceable download links that accompany their biographies. Both creators are controlled through Yoke, as well as the company’s application marketing software as a source of revenue.
Moore’s recent promotion of the Hotspot Shield VPN app on TikTok earned the author about $40,000, according to Yoke.
“It’s all performance-based, so if you’re able to interact with your audience and generate a lot of installations with your videos, you get paid through download,” said Ercan Boyraz, Yoke’s head of skill control. “There is no restriction on what you can earn.”
While some TikTok creators are adding tracking links to their bios to be paid to generate app installs, megastars with tens of millions of subscribers like Addison Rae Easterling and Dixie D’Amelio are still negotiating fixed-sum offers for app promotions, according to Thor. Fridriksson, CEO of Teatime Games, recently announced a new app called Trivia Royale.
“We did a couple of posts with both Dixie and Addison and I have never ever seen an influencer campaign work as effectively as those posts by those stars,” Fridriksson said.
“We didn’t have any links,” he said. “We had no way to attribute how many users came exactly from these influencers. But we know that when they posted the posts, the number of organic [installs] skyrocketed and kept going.”
Easterling published its promotional video for Trivia Royale on July 12. The next day, the app moved from the 25th loose iPhone app downloaded at most to the 6th maximum installed, a rating under TikTok itself, according to the knowledge compiled through the analysis of the Sensor La tour corporate application.
“At the same time that we did this [campaign], we brought a new feature in the game that became very popular,” Fridriksson said, noting that updating the app contributed to its growth in the iPhone App Store, in addition to the company’s TikTok campaign. “It’s a bit of those two things combined.”
“We were lucky enough to get into this viral marketing mode so early because I’m pretty sure that the price of these stars will build up very quickly,” Fridriksson added.
For more stories on how TikTok users make money from the app, see the other Business Insider articles: