Making Money By Watching TikTok Videos? Is That Real?

Get-rich-schemes have been around for more than a century.

From unscrupulous investment advisors promising impossibly-high monthly interest rates, to “Nigerian princes” wanting to share their riches with unsuspecting email recipients, there’s never been a shortage of scammers trying to separate people from their money. And the Internet has made the situation worse than ever.

That’s understandably led most people to look skeptically at any purported online opportunity to make easy money for very little work. Just fill out surveys and play games on your phone, for example, and you’ll be seeing the money roll in? Few take the bait.

One of those purported opportunities claims that you can earn paychecks just for watching TikTok content. It sounds like a great gig. Is it legit?

Let’s find out.

Can You Make Money on TikTok by Watching Videos?

You’ve probably already guessed the answer to this question, but we have to officially break it to you: these offers are almost all pyramid schemes or task scams.

• You’ve undoubtedly heard of pyramid schemes. People pay to sign up for a lucrative opportunity and have to convince others to join. Those who follow are paid out of the first group’s investments, and the whole pyramid eventually collapses. In the case of TikTok viewing, you’d have to pay to sign up for the program or give away personal data with no possibility of making money.
• The US Federal Trade Commission describes task scams as fake opportunities; people perform repetitive tasks like watching videos and see “earnings” add up in an online account. There are no earnings, though, and eventually people who fall for the ploy are asked to make payments (often in untraceable crypto) before they can collect their money. They lose out; the scammers win.

A number of these operations have sprung up over the years — and have quickly disappeared. They promise that you just have to watch TikTok videos on their dedicated app and register your opinions, and you’ll get paid for every TikTok view you provide. They disappear, quite simply, because they’re scams.

We do have to be honest. Very rarely, a social media marketing agency like Ubiquitous will pay small panels to view TikTok posts as part of a research project to evaluate content approaches and document trends.

However, competition for slots on the panels is fierce, the jobs don’t last long, the compensation is small, and your chances of getting hired to sit and watch TikTok videos all day are virtually non-existent.

The only real way to earn money from TikTok-related activity is to do it the “old-fashioned” way: creating content and then monetizing your account through the TikTok Creativity Program, finding sponsors, opening a TikTok Shop, or earning tips from Live streams.

If you want to bring in money from spending time on the social media platform, you’ll have to do some real work. Sorry about that.