TikTok has become the fashionable social network. It is one of those statements that after repeating them so much seems to have remained empty, no matter how much they remain true. The video network has not stopped growing, it has more and more users and more dedicated and has established itself as the new great obsession of brands.
To that we must add that its impact already goes beyond that scenario. What happens on TikTok then generally goes viral and the other social networks are already looking at TikTok to determine what its future will be like. But how can TikTok be monetized? Of course, the platform itself has an advertising network, which has been promoting among the industry for months and trying to establish itself.
Advertisers are receptive at first, because TikTok is growing a lot, but at the same time, and as several studies have shown, they still feel a slight distrust of the new. For creators, generating income with TikTok requires complex work. A Cashfloat study has addressed the question of how many video views you need to achieve in order to survive as a content creator.
The analysis did not seek even large numbers. He only tried to find the specific point at which the average salary would be equalized, based on 44 European countries. The truth is that the data shows that to make a living from the social network you need many, many income. The British would need to accumulate an average of 102,830,330 views to equal the average salary of 31,968 euros in their country.
In Liechtenstein they would have to exceed 188 million viewings, in Switzerland 174 and in Luxembourg 137. That is, to no longer ‘ride the dollar’ but to equalize the income that the inhabitants of the place have on average, you need to be quite successful and popular and ensure that the videos are being watched by many people.
The key is in sales
But how do you pay for your success on TikTok? The issue worries not only content creators who aspire to become influencers on the social network, but companies, market analysts and TikTok itself (at least, that must be assumed). The key to success on TikTok and what could turn the social network into a profitable platform could generally lie in the impact on sales patterns.
Specifically, this could translate into a conversion into e-commerce. The pull of TikTok as a sales booster is already seen in some specific sectors. The new obsession of the book industry, for example, is booktokers , who are managing to propel some books to best-seller status.
The success of booktokers is demonstrated by not only looking at how they promote the fashion books of the moment, but also how they do it with books that are already years old and therefore are not being commented on on other platforms. It is not the only space in which the pull of TikTok as a sales prescriber has been noticed.
As noted in The New York Times , TikTok has demonstrated an astonishing ability to drive fashions and trends across all types of verticals. From cleaning products to toys to clothing items, its pull in the market has been derived from its moment of viral glory on TikTok. Products that become the latest “sensation” on TikTok also rank as the next big seller.
So much so, that in the US Amazon already has a product section called “the latest to go viral.” And TikTok is not going to sit idly by. The company is already promoting tools focused on the impact of shopping marketing, such as TikTok Shopping, which works as a product showcase. It is a luck to professionalize what until now was a somewhat amateur reality.
The future TikTok online store
Perhaps, in addition, it is only the first step for a much larger emporium in the world of commerce, a way to make more money with the purchases of users of the social network. As Insider published a few days ago , ByteDance has active searches for workers for ecommerce profiles around the world. ByteDance is the owner of TikTok and in one of the ads it says, directly, that “TikTok is the ideal platform to give a brand a new and better ecommerce experience”.
The almost inevitable conclusion is that ByteDance is working to launch its own e-commerce platform, a potential competitor to Amazon and AliExpress. A Chinese analyst points out to the US media: “they are definitely dying to be in ecommerce.”
