Does TikTok pay? Creators can earn $10,000 a month, but most are making less than $500
Becca Bastos, who grew up in Mineola, was working full time as a nanny when she started posting videos on TikTok spoofing Long Island moms. Now Bastos, 27, has 2.5 million followers and has made enough money through her posts to quit her job and move to Los Angeles.
Joe Mele, who lives on the East End, dropped out of Binghamton University, where he was studying business administration, to create comical TikTok videos with his father, Frank, 61, and family. Mele, 24, now has 27 million followers, makes his living as a content creator and was recently tapped to appear in a TV commercial.
Grace Mary Williams of Huntington Station started posting on TikTok about candy and toys and now has 2.3 million followers and sells her own brand of slime for kids. When she told her grandmother that she was pursuing content creation as her job, Grandma was skeptical.
"Until after my first brand deal and I told her how much it was," says Williams, 24.
Creating content full time is the aspiration of many TikTok users, says Catherine Halaby, TikTok’s head of entertainment for North America. “And we know that is happening constantly.” The platform has proved lucrative in a variety of ways, with sponsored videos, for instance, allowing creators to earn $100 to more than $1 million per post. It has changed the lives of a number of Long Islanders who have successfully harnessed the app's potential.
According to a 2023 Creator Compensation Report by Boston-based influencer marketing platform Mavrck, a survey of 552 content creators in the United States showed 3% earned more than $10,000 per month last year through social media, and 47% made less than $500. When looking at TikTok's earning potential alone, the biggest breakout personalities made the big money and 75% reported earning less than $500 per month on the app.
Bastos was offered $200 for a video when she started out in 2020. “I didn’t even know that was something I could monetize,” she says. Bastos now earns far more by adding sponsored content along with her other posts, partnering with brands including Blink Video Doorbell, Dave & Buster's, Tampax, Maybelline, Amazon and Twisted Tea.
"It's so cool people can make a living off it," Williams says.
Launched in China, the TikTok app became available worldwide in 2018. It allows users to post and watch 15-second to three-minute videos with music and filters, many of which are entertaining or humorous. TikTok uses an algorithm — a system for tracking what each user likes to see — and sends more of those types of videos to the user’s feed.
"I didn't download the app right away," Mele says. In 2019, he made his first video with his dad. "I did a video with him in the car, asking how many likes to stop smoking," Mele says. "He responded, 'I don't smoke.' A few hours went by and … I think the video had 13,000 views. I thought, 'That's insane.' " The video eventually hit a half-million views. "That one video sparked the whole domino effect, the snowball effect," Mele says.
Mele's biggest videos — including one where Mele dressed his dad up as Anton Ego, the food critic from the animated movie "Ratatouille" — have more than 50 million views.
At the beginning, Mele says he had no financial stability. But he focused on posting three to four videos a day, treating it as a job and working strategically seven days a week. "I saw it very early on turning into something big," Mele says. "I really believed in what we were doing and believed in myself."
So how much can a content creator earn? Neal Schaffer, author of “The Age of Influence” (Harper Collins Leadership, $19.95) and a professor at the UCLA extension who is teaching a new class called “Personal Branding and Becoming an Influencer,” calls content creation compensation “the Wild West” and says it all comes down to negotiation.
TikTok creators can be paid directly through the app from the TikTok Creator Fund until Dec. 16, when it will be discontinued and creators will be encouraged to earn money through the TikTok Creativity Program, which rewards creators according to a formula based on their engagement or on the length of their videos. But that’s not where the payoff is, creators say. The real money is in working with brands to promote products through individual posts or longer-term brand ambassador relationships. “Those can be really remunerative,” TikTok's Halaby agrees. “Brand deals can be really significant either on a per-video basis or on an ongoing brand ambassador kind of basis.”
Pay depends on a variety of factors, including the number of followers and the average number of video views. “For smaller influencers, it’s in the hundreds, moving into the thousands, and then, obviously for bigger influencers, it moves into the 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars per post,” Schaffer says. “When it gets to numbers, there’s such a wide range.”
Chris Russo is CEO of New York City-based Russo Strategic Partners and represents content creators. “The people who have followers in the millions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make six figures for a video collaboration," he says.
Mele declined to reveal how much he earns annually as a full-time creator, except to say: “I do well and I’m very happy with the way things are going. I’m living a very, very comfortable life.”
How do TikTok content creators get from Point A (no followers) to Point B (big bucks)?
Creators first need to build an online community of loyal followers. Often content creators will have a certain niche or expertise in an area or appeal to a particular demographic and will use hashtags to get noticed. “You need a strategy,” Russo says. “What are you the go-to expert on? Once you find something that works, you replicate it again and again in every way possible.”
One reason working with creators is so appealing to advertisers is that TikTok viewers don’t have to be following an influencer to see that content.
“TikTok is also unique in that before, like with Facebook, we would only see content from our friends. But the TikTok algorithm will introduce content from anyone,” Schaffer says. A content creator with 10,000 followers still might create a video that winds up being seen by hundreds of thousands of users.
Brands may start by offering a smaller creator free merchandise in exchange for being mentioned in a post. Nicholas Russo, 18, of Amityville (no relation to Chris Russo) is a freshman at Farmingdale State who started his TikTok posts rating bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches on the Island while he was still in high school, using the nickname @thebecguy.
He partners with a Long Beach-based clothing company called Locals Only Long Island. They give him clothes with the company’s logo that he wears in his videos, and he finishes every post with the company slogan “Always keep it local.” In exchange, the company also pays for his egg and cheese sandwiches and pays him a nominal fee. Locals Only Long Island owner Kevin Carman says Russo is a good fit because he exposes the clothing brand to a younger generation that is centered on Long Island.
Once a creator gains traction, they may begin to work with bigger brands and earn bigger bucks. Creators can reach out to brands directly to offer to market for them, Schaffer says. Or get on influencer lists such as Mavrck so brands seeking to launch TikTok campaigns can find them.
"Creators are getting more offers in 2023 than they were in 2022. That means there is more collaboration opportunity," says Sean Naegeli, Mavrck co-founder and chief innovation and research officer. In a Mavrck survey of 113 brands in August, 83% said they were interested in leveraging TikTok for their influencer marketing campaigns. In 2021, 59% of content creators said they were making sponsored TikToks, while this year, 90% say they are making TikToks as part of a branded sponsorship opportunity, Naegeli says.
Kristi Daraban, associate vice president of social media for Nationwide, the insurance and financial services company, says Nationwide, which started working with TikTok creators earlier this year, looks for content creators who have a demographic that might be of interest to the company in its milestone areas such as having a baby or buying a house. The company will hire the creator to come up with a concept and then the creator will post, she says.
Creators say that when they incorporate a sponsor into a post, they try to make it as authentic to their typical posts as possible. “You click away as soon as you know it’s an ad,” Bastos says.
Some companies will offer content creators the option of affiliate marketing. In those cases, the creator is given a link to share and they earn a percentage of the profit for each sale attributed to them, Schaffer says.
And more and more brands are doing long-term brand ambassador relationships, where they might have a yearlong commitment from a creator, he says. Companies can pay a creator a certain amount of money per month to do an agreed-upon number of collaborations monthly. Having a monthly fee makes being a content creator more sustainable. “You have some sort of stable money that can cover overhead and can cover rent, then you can pursue other collaborations,” Schaffer says.
At some point, creators may want to hire representation, and a social media manager will typically take 10% to 15% of deal fees, Chris Russo says. “It’s harder to be your own advocate. A lot of influencers when they are starting out are vastly underpaid,” he says.
That’s because they may not know for what they should be asking, experts say. Who ultimately owns the video? Does the brand have usage rights beyond the original TikTok post? Is this deal just for one video, or for multiple? Is the brand expecting exclusivity — meaning the creator can’t also sign deals with competitors in their sector for a certain period?
“Some influencers that don’t know better might allow usage rights without asking for money,” Schaffer says. “Smart influencers would tack on 10, 25, 50%. I don’t know, right? But they would definitely say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to reuse my content then I need to charge you extra.’ ”
Danielle Sepsy, 33, of Garden City says she hired Russo’s marketing agency to film, edit and post her videos and to broker deals for her. She is a chef focusing on producing up to 150,000 baked goods a month through her company, The Hungry Gnome. “I just didn’t have the manpower to do it, nor did I have the skill set,” she says.
Sepsy's goal on TikTok, where she has 89,000 followers, is to promote her brand recognition and her business in a way that translates into more sales of her baked goods. She's done brand deals with Brisk Iced Tea, Nutella and Barilla pasta. She usually films on Thursdays in her home kitchen.
Sepsy's posts featuring her pastina recipes got her interviewed on “Good Morning America” after Ronzoni announced it was discontinuing pastina earlier this year, creating a frenzy among fans of the pasta shape.
Exposure on the platform can lead to opportunities in the real world, creators say. They get invitations to appear at brick-and-mortar stores and red-carpet events. They might get offers elsewhere in the entertainment industry. They could launch their own product to promote to their fans.
Rohan Murphy, 39, of East Islip is a motivational speaker who visits elementary, middle and high schools and colleges. Murphy was born with his legs facing backward and at age 4 they were amputated. Murphy goes to schools across the country talking about goal setting and overcoming adversity. He says posting clips from his visits has garnered him 15 to 20 additional jobs over the past two years because students from other schools see the videos and ask their administrators to bring him to their school.
Mele was invited by YouTube to post from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California this year and was also invited to participate in the Knicks alumni versus celebrities basketball game at Madison Square Garden.
“We certainly hear from studios … like a Disney or a Paramount or a Netflix,” says TikTok's Halaby, and TikTok keeps a "Showbiz" list that they share with others. “I get outreach from our studio partners saying, ‘Who is the new hot talent?’ or ‘We’re looking to cast something, can you give us tips on who is breaking through on TikTok?’ ”
Other creators, such as Williams, create their own offerings that they promote to their followers. Williams, for instance, sells more than a dozen slimes.
“I think a lot of TikTok creators … they’re trying to monetize their community by creating their own product,” Schaffer says, such as a line of cosmetics. “I think that’s the end game for a lot of content creators, so they don’t have to rely on these collaborations, which sort of come and go.”
Becca Bastos, who grew up in Mineola, was working full time as a nanny when she started posting videos on TikTok spoofing Long Island moms. Now Bastos, 27, has 2.5 million followers and has made enough money through her posts to quit her job and move to Los Angeles.
Joe Mele, who lives on the East End, dropped out of Binghamton University, where he was studying business administration, to create comical TikTok videos with his father, Frank, 61, and family. Mele, 24, now has 27 million followers, makes his living as a content creator and was recently tapped to appear in a TV commercial.
Grace Mary Williams of Huntington Station started posting on TikTok about candy and toys and now has 2.3 million followers and sells her own brand of slime for kids. When she told her grandmother that she was pursuing content creation as her job, Grandma was skeptical.
"Until after my first brand deal and I told her how much it was," says Williams, 24.
Creating content full time is the aspiration of many TikTok users, says Catherine Halaby, TikTok’s head of entertainment for North America. “And we know that is happening constantly.” The platform has proved lucrative in a variety of ways, with sponsored videos, for instance, allowing creators to earn $100 to more than $1 million per post. It has changed the lives of a number of Long Islanders who have successfully harnessed the app's potential.
According to a 2023 Creator Compensation Report by Boston-based influencer marketing platform Mavrck, a survey of 552 content creators in the United States showed 3% earned more than $10,000 per month last year through social media, and 47% made less than $500. When looking at TikTok's earning potential alone, the biggest breakout personalities made the big money and 75% reported earning less than $500 per month on the app.
Bastos was offered $200 for a video when she started out in 2020. “I didn’t even know that was something I could monetize,” she says. Bastos now earns far more by adding sponsored content along with her other posts, partnering with brands including Blink Video Doorbell, Dave & Buster's, Tampax, Maybelline, Amazon and Twisted Tea.
"It's so cool people can make a living off it," Williams says.
Check out the creatorsIt gives people a chance to be their own bosses. Personally, I think this is the new normal.
Grace Mary Williams, 2.4 million followers
TIKTOK AS THE ‘WILD WEST'
Launched in China, the TikTok app became available worldwide in 2018. It allows users to post and watch 15-second to three-minute videos with music and filters, many of which are entertaining or humorous. TikTok uses an algorithm — a system for tracking what each user likes to see — and sends more of those types of videos to the user’s feed.
"I didn't download the app right away," Mele says. In 2019, he made his first video with his dad. "I did a video with him in the car, asking how many likes to stop smoking," Mele says. "He responded, 'I don't smoke.' A few hours went by and … I think the video had 13,000 views. I thought, 'That's insane.' " The video eventually hit a half-million views. "That one video sparked the whole domino effect, the snowball effect," Mele says.
Mele's biggest videos — including one where Mele dressed his dad up as Anton Ego, the food critic from the animated movie "Ratatouille" — have more than 50 million views.
Danielle Sepsy of Garden City films a TikTok video in her home kitchen Nov. 2; Rohan Murphy of East Islip visits students at Bay Shore Middle School Nov. 3; Grace Mary Williams of Huntington Station reviews a toy for a TikTok video Nov. 16. Credit: Debbie Egan-Chin; Rick Kopstein; Morgan Campbell
At the beginning, Mele says he had no financial stability. But he focused on posting three to four videos a day, treating it as a job and working strategically seven days a week. "I saw it very early on turning into something big," Mele says. "I really believed in what we were doing and believed in myself."
So how much can a content creator earn? Neal Schaffer, author of “The Age of Influence” (Harper Collins Leadership, $19.95) and a professor at the UCLA extension who is teaching a new class called “Personal Branding and Becoming an Influencer,” calls content creation compensation “the Wild West” and says it all comes down to negotiation.
Influencer marketing platform Mavrck surveyed 552 content creators in the U.S. this year between the ages of 18 and 34. More than half of them had between 10,000 and 99,999 social media followers. Nearly 40% said content creation is their full-time job.
47% made up to $500
27% made $501 to $2,000
19% made $2,001 to $6,000
4% made $6,001 to $10,000
3% made $10,000+
75% made up to $500
22% made $501 to $2,000
1% made up to $2,500
2% made $2,501+
TikTok creators can be paid directly through the app from the TikTok Creator Fund until Dec. 16, when it will be discontinued and creators will be encouraged to earn money through the TikTok Creativity Program, which rewards creators according to a formula based on their engagement or on the length of their videos. But that’s not where the payoff is, creators say. The real money is in working with brands to promote products through individual posts or longer-term brand ambassador relationships. “Those can be really remunerative,” TikTok's Halaby agrees. “Brand deals can be really significant either on a per-video basis or on an ongoing brand ambassador kind of basis.”
Paid by TikTok Creator Fund (through Dec. 16), Creativity Program (videos longer than 1 minute), live video gifts and TikTok Shop
Paid by brands Partnership deals, posts on other social media platforms, paid affiliate links and brand ambassador programs
Expanding to the real world Marketing your own product sold on and off TikTok, paid event appearances and commercials
Pay depends on a variety of factors, including the number of followers and the average number of video views. “For smaller influencers, it’s in the hundreds, moving into the thousands, and then, obviously for bigger influencers, it moves into the 10, 15, 20 thousand dollars per post,” Schaffer says. “When it gets to numbers, there’s such a wide range.”
Chris Russo is CEO of New York City-based Russo Strategic Partners and represents content creators. “The people who have followers in the millions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make six figures for a video collaboration," he says.
Mele declined to reveal how much he earns annually as a full-time creator, except to say: “I do well and I’m very happy with the way things are going. I’m living a very, very comfortable life.”
How do TikTok content creators get from Point A (no followers) to Point B (big bucks)?
HOW TO GET NOTICED ON TIKTOK
Creators first need to build an online community of loyal followers. Often content creators will have a certain niche or expertise in an area or appeal to a particular demographic and will use hashtags to get noticed. “You need a strategy,” Russo says. “What are you the go-to expert on? Once you find something that works, you replicate it again and again in every way possible.”
One reason working with creators is so appealing to advertisers is that TikTok viewers don’t have to be following an influencer to see that content.
“TikTok is also unique in that before, like with Facebook, we would only see content from our friends. But the TikTok algorithm will introduce content from anyone,” Schaffer says. A content creator with 10,000 followers still might create a video that winds up being seen by hundreds of thousands of users.
Brands may start by offering a smaller creator free merchandise in exchange for being mentioned in a post. Nicholas Russo, 18, of Amityville (no relation to Chris Russo) is a freshman at Farmingdale State who started his TikTok posts rating bacon, egg and cheese sandwiches on the Island while he was still in high school, using the nickname @thebecguy.
Nicholas Russo of Amityville, known on TikTok as a bacon, egg and cheese taste-tester, samples a sandwich from The Better Bagel in Amityville Nov. 3; Joe Mele, an East End native, films TikTok videos with his father, Frank. Credit: Rick Kopstein; Joe Mele
He partners with a Long Beach-based clothing company called Locals Only Long Island. They give him clothes with the company’s logo that he wears in his videos, and he finishes every post with the company slogan “Always keep it local.” In exchange, the company also pays for his egg and cheese sandwiches and pays him a nominal fee. Locals Only Long Island owner Kevin Carman says Russo is a good fit because he exposes the clothing brand to a younger generation that is centered on Long Island.
HOW TO START MAKING MONEY ON TIKTOK
Once a creator gains traction, they may begin to work with bigger brands and earn bigger bucks. Creators can reach out to brands directly to offer to market for them, Schaffer says. Or get on influencer lists such as Mavrck so brands seeking to launch TikTok campaigns can find them.
"Creators are getting more offers in 2023 than they were in 2022. That means there is more collaboration opportunity," says Sean Naegeli, Mavrck co-founder and chief innovation and research officer. In a Mavrck survey of 113 brands in August, 83% said they were interested in leveraging TikTok for their influencer marketing campaigns. In 2021, 59% of content creators said they were making sponsored TikToks, while this year, 90% say they are making TikToks as part of a branded sponsorship opportunity, Naegeli says.
Kristi Daraban, associate vice president of social media for Nationwide, the insurance and financial services company, says Nationwide, which started working with TikTok creators earlier this year, looks for content creators who have a demographic that might be of interest to the company in its milestone areas such as having a baby or buying a house. The company will hire the creator to come up with a concept and then the creator will post, she says.
Creators say that when they incorporate a sponsor into a post, they try to make it as authentic to their typical posts as possible. “You click away as soon as you know it’s an ad,” Bastos says.
Some companies will offer content creators the option of affiliate marketing. In those cases, the creator is given a link to share and they earn a percentage of the profit for each sale attributed to them, Schaffer says.
And more and more brands are doing long-term brand ambassador relationships, where they might have a yearlong commitment from a creator, he says. Companies can pay a creator a certain amount of money per month to do an agreed-upon number of collaborations monthly. Having a monthly fee makes being a content creator more sustainable. “You have some sort of stable money that can cover overhead and can cover rent, then you can pursue other collaborations,” Schaffer says.
Watch them in action on TikTokHOW INFLUENCERS CREATE A BUSINESS
At some point, creators may want to hire representation, and a social media manager will typically take 10% to 15% of deal fees, Chris Russo says. “It’s harder to be your own advocate. A lot of influencers when they are starting out are vastly underpaid,” he says.
That’s because they may not know for what they should be asking, experts say. Who ultimately owns the video? Does the brand have usage rights beyond the original TikTok post? Is this deal just for one video, or for multiple? Is the brand expecting exclusivity — meaning the creator can’t also sign deals with competitors in their sector for a certain period?
“Some influencers that don’t know better might allow usage rights without asking for money,” Schaffer says. “Smart influencers would tack on 10, 25, 50%. I don’t know, right? But they would definitely say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to reuse my content then I need to charge you extra.’ ”
Danielle Sepsy, 33, of Garden City says she hired Russo’s marketing agency to film, edit and post her videos and to broker deals for her. She is a chef focusing on producing up to 150,000 baked goods a month through her company, The Hungry Gnome. “I just didn’t have the manpower to do it, nor did I have the skill set,” she says.
Sepsy's goal on TikTok, where she has 89,000 followers, is to promote her brand recognition and her business in a way that translates into more sales of her baked goods. She's done brand deals with Brisk Iced Tea, Nutella and Barilla pasta. She usually films on Thursdays in her home kitchen.
Sepsy's posts featuring her pastina recipes got her interviewed on “Good Morning America” after Ronzoni announced it was discontinuing pastina earlier this year, creating a frenzy among fans of the pasta shape.
TIKTOK CREATOR PERKS
Exposure on the platform can lead to opportunities in the real world, creators say. They get invitations to appear at brick-and-mortar stores and red-carpet events. They might get offers elsewhere in the entertainment industry. They could launch their own product to promote to their fans.
Rohan Murphy, 39, of East Islip is a motivational speaker who visits elementary, middle and high schools and colleges. Murphy was born with his legs facing backward and at age 4 they were amputated. Murphy goes to schools across the country talking about goal setting and overcoming adversity. He says posting clips from his visits has garnered him 15 to 20 additional jobs over the past two years because students from other schools see the videos and ask their administrators to bring him to their school.
Mele was invited by YouTube to post from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California this year and was also invited to participate in the Knicks alumni versus celebrities basketball game at Madison Square Garden.
“We certainly hear from studios … like a Disney or a Paramount or a Netflix,” says TikTok's Halaby, and TikTok keeps a "Showbiz" list that they share with others. “I get outreach from our studio partners saying, ‘Who is the new hot talent?’ or ‘We’re looking to cast something, can you give us tips on who is breaking through on TikTok?’ ”
Other creators, such as Williams, create their own offerings that they promote to their followers. Williams, for instance, sells more than a dozen slimes.
“I think a lot of TikTok creators … they’re trying to monetize their community by creating their own product,” Schaffer says, such as a line of cosmetics. “I think that’s the end game for a lot of content creators, so they don’t have to rely on these collaborations, which sort of come and go.”
Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.
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