TikTok is aggressively courting creators and agencies to showcase the revenue potential of its livestreaming tools.
TikTok says its creators are now collectively generating $10 million in revenue daily through livestreaming — a figure the company shared during an in-person mixer for creators, agencies and press at its New York City headquarters on April 24.
The event was part of an ongoing series of in-person mixers TikTok plans to host at its NYC headquarters, to encourage creators to further embrace its livestreaming services. The platform has been steadily building its services and tools for Live creators, launching a dedicated Discord server for TikTok Live creators and creator networks on April 9, as well as providing access to webinars and virtual training Zoom calls, which also kicked off in early April. The platform now wants to build on that momentum.
At the April 24 event, which TikTok held in collaboration with the creator monetization platform Beacons.ai, TikTok representatives showered attendees with statistics intended to highlight how much money both creators and agencies can make from the platform’s livestreaming offerings over cocktails and small bites.
According to speakers Yannick Luna (TikTok Live’s U.S. social agency lead) and Merzia Cutlerywala (a creator network growth manager at TikTok Live), TikTok Live creators generated $63 million in revenue in the last 30 days, with 80.4 percent of that revenue coming from creators with fewer than 50,000 followers. Top-performing creator networks — which are typically managed by third-party agencies or influencer marketing companies and act as a bridge between creators, brands and TikTok — can make $3 million per month, per the presentation. At the moment, over 400,000 creators go live daily, and over 30 million users watch TikTok livestreams every day.
“The event was fantastic — really opened my eyes to the incredible potential of TikTok Live,” said attendee Tempestt Young, chief media strategist for the creator network AI Publicist. “Loved hearing the success stories during the panel, especially about how creators are maximizing their earnings through strategic livestreaming schedules and audience engagement.” The event series predates Trump’s April 5 extension of the U.S. government’s TikTok ban, with the first iteration taking place in mid-March.
Currently, TikTok creators make the bulk of their revenue through the platform’s Creator Fund revenue share program, which pays creators between $0.02 and $0.04 per view by giving them a cut of TikTok’s advertising revenue. Casual creators can make a few hundred bucks per month, with proceeds for larger creators scaling up into the thousands of dollars. While brand deals remain the most lucrative revenue stream for TikTok creators, livestreaming offers a new income source that comes directly from fans, not advertisers.
Creators and agencies generate revenue from TikTok Live in different ways. For creators, live gifting is the primary revenue source: viewers purchase “TikTok coins” using real money, then use those coins to buy virtual gifts such as roses or hearts, which they can give to creators during livestreams. Creators receive those gifts in the form of “diamonds,” which they can convert into actual money, with TikTok taking a 50 percent cut of the proceeds. The number of diamonds awarded corresponds to the value of the gifts received, with creators getting about $0.005 for each diamond they exchange.
“We aim to democratize Live content creation, making it available to everyone and at the same time build a strong and sustainable creator economy,” said TikTok head of Live operations Shen Gao. “Creators should be rewarded for the time and effort it takes to go live, engage with their fans, community and new viewers.”
Creators’ approaches to live gifting vary, with some simply gleaning revenue from gifts that organically come in and others actively encouraging viewers to send gifts. TikTok creator Libby Amber Shayo, for example, said that she incentivizes live gifting by giving some gifters a chance to participate directly in her livestreams.
“It used to be that you could only go up if you had a certain amount of followers,” Shayo said. “Now, anybody can be a guest, and I think that’s a really cool advantage — to have a conversation with people who are actually watching your content.”
Creator networks’ revenue comes from TikTok’s share, rather than taking a percentage of creators’ gifting revenue. Depending on the performance of creators in the agency’s network, TikTok pays agencies on a sliding scale, with higher-earning agencies gaining access to successive tiers of resources and support from TikTok as they make more revenue, including training, one-on-one management for key agencies, and direct introductions with prospective advertisers. Per TikTok’s presentation, the three tiers are “Training Camp” ($0 to $40,000 in monthly revenue), “Accelerate” ($40,000 to $800,000 in monthly revenue) and “Growth” (over $800,000 in monthly revenue).
“For creators, it doesn’t really matter if they are working with nobody or working for an agency, because either way, they’re getting 50 percent,” said Gigi Robinson, a creator and founder of the creator network Hosts of Influence. “When they work with an agency, that’s where they get the resources and the benefit of the agency owner or the creative network. Creators that work with me will get my methodology to growing and scaling as a creator.”
Although TikTok’s educational efforts around livestreaming have largely focused on the live gifting opportunity, TikTok creators are also finding success using livestreaming to build their e-commerce businesses on TikTok Shop, essentially acting as salespeople for both their sponsors’ products and their own product lines.
“We are seeing more brands interested in the power of Live as it helps to create authentic engagement moments,” Gao said. “This is especially true via ecommerce, where the combination of a strong product, a creative on-brand creator, and the ability to drive engagement and questions about the product from the audience creates a stronger conversion to purchase.”
TikTok creator Jcarria “Braidtherapy803” Vance, for example, said that she typically makes a baseline of between $4,000 and $5,000 per month by going live on TikTok for an average of 40 hours every week, and that she plans to leverage her million-plus following to promote her own line of hair products when it launches next month.
“Not having to figure out the mechanics, or find a reliable source to even sell your items, makes it easier for you — all you have to do is turn on the personality, have a great product and a genuine story, and it gives you that opportunity to be successful,” said Vance, who did not attend last week’s NYC event, but has been going live on TikTok since the platform started beta-testing the function in 2019. “It’s QVC 2.0.”
Naturally, the future of TikTok’s livestreaming push hangs in the balance for creators, as the outcome of the ongoing decision on TikTok’s potential ban in the U.S. remains unresolved. President Trump’s recent executive order extends the deadline for ByteDance to divest its U.S. operations to June 19, meaning the revenue opportunities created by TikTok Live could be rendered moot if the divestiture doesn’t go through.
But for now, as far as creators and agencies are concerned, it’s business as usual.
