Let's Talk TikTok

October 03, 2024

TikTok Isn’t The Same As It Used To Be…

The other day I was scrolling TikTok and I noticed a few things. One thing that continues to stand out to me is that I very rarely see posts form anyone I actually follow. Out of 50 posts, 15 of them were sponsored, affiliate posts, or TikTok lives selling a product. One third of my feed is now creators pushing products for affiliate fees. This could be problematic for the future success of TikTok in America, here’s why…

How Did We Get Here?

Monetization on TikTok has been somewhat non-existent for most creators. For some, they’re receiving 2-4 cents per thousand views, significantly less than YouTube (longer videos). I’ve always been optimistic that TikTok could figure out how to monetize 10 minute videos, but we haven’t seen that yet. I still think that TikTok is one of the best platforms for discoverability, but I’m not surprised that creators are moving on to other platforms.

Propping up TikTok Shop is making it so that I’m not seeing as many videos that I like as I used to. In the past when I used TikTok, my algorithm understood what I wanted. Every single session I was getting videos in a 5 minutes session that I really wanted to watch. Now, it feels like 30% of the time I’m getting TikTok Shop content that I don’t want to watch. I’ve bought a few products on Shop, but I wouldn’t say I’m an avid buyer. There’s a lot of products that I would never buy, and it’s making my experience on TikTok worse.

How TikTok Shop Changed The Platform…

I spoke about this more a few months ago in our Night Light on TikTok Shop—some sellers have done over $2 million in sales in a littler over 4 months. It’s also how creators have been making money too, if the CPMs stay as low as they’ve been, I’d expect more creators to prioritize affiliate posts and selling on TikTok Live.


If this trend continues, the creators that prioritize Shop will benefit the most because their content is being fed out to people like my friends and I, who don’t necessarily buy products on the platform. If you’ve spent time watching Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts lately, this obviously isn’t the case—shopping isn’t prioritized on those platforms. My worry is that YouTube an Instagram (given that TikTok is prioritizing Shop so much) trends in the same direction and the majority of videos that I see there are going to be shopping related.

We do understand how popular this is in Asia (especially China) where Austin Lee is selling billions of dollars in products every single week, but I think it takes longer to catch on here. The total addressable marker (TAM) in America for buying items on short-form content or TikTok Live is not even remotely close to the market for buyers in Asia.

What’s Next?

Obviously I’ve always been very outspoken and bullish on YouTube’s long-form monetization. I still think it’s the best for any creator in the entire community, and I don’t see that changing over the next 3 years. Prioritizing long-form content on YouTube will continue to be the gold standard for monetization. There’s definitely a time and place where people should be prioritizing content on TikTok to grow their audience because the discoverability is still unmatched there. Eventually, creators figure out how to shift their audience to other places—It could be podcasting, or long-form on Youtube. Creators are getting way better at this, especially if they’re not just selling products.

The Big Takeaway

Something has felt off with my For You Page lately, and I’m getting served way more promoted posts selling products. Not everyone on the platform is buying products, the market of people buying products on short-form isn’t trending the same way as countries in Asia. It still has a place in growing your audience, at some point creators are going to have to figure out how to shift their audience to long-form.

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