Earning Money On TikTok Live: More Options Than Just Tips

Anyone who’s spent much time in TikTok Live streams knows that hosts can receive tips, in the form of “gifts,” from TikTok users watching the session. They may not realize that many more revenue-generation opportunities exist for the content creators who run the shows.

For most of the people who run Lives, gifts are an important source of income. However, influencers and others with large followings on the social media platform can take advantage of their popularity to bring in revenue streams in a variety of ways.

Let’s take a look.

How to Make Money on TikTok Live

Almost any TikTok user with more than 1,000 followers can run a Live show.

You must have a personal TikTok account (not a business one) in good standing, be located in a country where streaming is offered as an option, and be over the age of 16. However, you have to be at least 18 to accept gifts; you must have 10,000+ followers and join the app’s Creativity Program for most other account monetization opportunities.

Lives can be a good way for both hosts and visitors to have fun, but most popular creators love running streams because they can earn good money doing it. Here’s how it works.

Gifts

When you first visit a Live session, you may wonder what’s going on with all the roses and pandas popping up on the screen. You’ll quickly figure out, though, that those are tips from audience members showing their appreciation to the person hosting the stream.

They’re known as gifts, and there’s a huge range of them available for purchase. Users buy gifts with an internal currency called TikTok coins, sold both in the stream and in TikTok profiles. Some, like roses, represent a tip of about one cent apiece, while pandas cost about seven cents to purchase.

Those gifts are given casually in TikTok Lives, but viewers who want to show that they really appreciate the host have much more expensive options.

A train costs a little more than ten dollars, the price of an octopus is more than $100, and the most expensive gift available, a TikTok Universe, is priced at $562. Extravagant gifts come complete with dazzling on-screen displays.

That’s not how much the recipients get, though. The total value of gifts accumulates until a creator wants to redeem them for cash, and TikTok keeps about half of the value before sending payment. Even so, the amount that influencers and extremely popular content creators earn by doing large numbers of Live streams is often a very comfortable income.

And that’s just one of the ways that enterprising TikTok entrepreneurs earn money in Live shows.

Sponsorships

Some high-powered influencers already have existing sponsors who would be happy to pay them for exposure in the app’s Live sessions. For everyone else, there’s TikTok One, which has replaced the Creator Marketplace.

In TikTok One, brands offering sponsorship opportunities can be matched with users in search of sponsors. There’s a long list of possibilities for Live hosts to peruse and pitch with their stream details, proposed brand integration, and account stats. Users can earn between a few hundred and many thousands of dollars with these sponsorships, depending on their popularity.

Selling Products

Many Live streams are designed to showcase merchandise. Content creators have several options:

• Selling their own merchandise marketed in the TikTok Shop
• Becoming an affiliate of another TikTok Shop merchandiser and selling their products
• Selling a sponsor’s products through an affiliate program not associated with TikTok

The possibilities for sales during Live sessions are so tempting that many streams can look more like a show on the Home Shopping Network than a typical TikTok feed.

Live Subscriptions

TikTok now allows creators to offer subscriptions to users. It’s up to the creators to determine whether to offer members exclusive content not visible to non-subscribers, special badges and stickers, or other goodies. But many make exclusive Live shows the centerpiece of their subscriptions, and they boost revenue dramatically just by promising numerous Live sessions.

Influencers and popular creators can charge as much as $100 per monthly membership, making this monetization option potentially one of the most lucrative available to TikTok Live hosts.

And all you have to do to get your share is become popular on the app. That’s not easy, but the revenue you can earn makes it a nice goal to shoot for.