Tik Tok remains perplexing and since a judge recently decided that I could probably still use Tik Tok even though my state has banned it I'm going to have to make decisions about it and I don't know everything that Tik Tok wants but I do know some things that Tik Tok wants because they're specific about it they're not hiding it but I am going to cave out the whole conversation by saying social media platforms are very powerful a social media platform that might be controlled by a government that is not good friends all the time with
my government does worry me I think if it doesn't worry you that probably means he got some bias around the issue and I do I have some bias around the issue like I make money on Tik Tok I make connections on Tik Tok Tik Tok is fun for me I like it but this conversation is not about geopolitics or the Chinese Communist party or the US government it is about the business of social media I just wanted to get that out of the way cuz people are going to be talking about it in the comments
and um you know fight uh nicely if you could please to talk a little bit about what I think Tik Tok wants it's important to look at the current state of what it is incentivizing creators to do as compared to other platforms there are basically three short form swipeable vertical video platforms I am of the opinion that by far the most significant innovation in these platforms is that you do not choose what you watch you are presented with content and so I call them swipeable video platforms let's start out with shorts that's YouTube's swipeable video
platform and what shorts appears to want is for you to not spend as much time on Tik Tok what shorts wants is videos that are shorter than 1 minute because it will not allow you to upload videos that are longer than 1 minute and have them still be short and YouTube and I think this is true does not monetize shorts based on what it wants it monetizes shorts based on what it has done and its existing relationship with creators however because of record labels and the rights situation with regards to music the deal is slightly
different than it is for the rest of YouTube but they share the revenue that gets made so money gets made YouTube gets some record labels get some creators get some that's how it works and if you want to make the case that YouTube is incentivizing something the thing that they are incentivizing is stability they aren't dumping a bunch of money in to have a short-term goal accomplished they're saying this is the revenue that we're making this is your cut this will always be your cut if we make more you will make more and at the
moment it's not a lot now it has started to creep up a little bit but it's not a lot and it's probably never going to be a lot and there are structural reasons and we'll get into them why swipeable video platforms are just going to make less money through traditional advertising than other video platforms next on our list of swipeable video platforms is meta's main one which is Instagram res I get a lot of views there as well what they're trying to incentivize as far as I can tell is creators figuring it out on their
own and not being so reliant on platforms to monetize for you I don't know man I'm biased against meta because they seem to not understand at all that it would be awful nice to have some we could rely on as creators instead of things that change constantly appear are huge important go away and then the cycle begins again they do have a monetization system right now it's called ads on reals and ads on Facebook and the way that it works is it shares revenue on a very specific ad unit that is not by any means
the most profitable ad unit they have you will sometimes rarely depending on who you are see an ad unit called ads on reals or ads on Facebook reels where there's a little like an ad that covers the bottom 25% of the screen on someone's real this isn't the instream ad where you're watching a video and you swipe and you see an ad it's actually sitting on top of the video wildly enough as far as I can tell it's impossible to tell how many views you get on Instagram real I can take all the videos I
uploaded in November and then put them in a spreadsheet and look at the views but that doesn't count any of the videos that I uploaded before November that are still getting views if you can figure out how to do it please let me know cuz it is wild to me that I do not know how many views I get on reals the reason I find it so infuriating is in part because it is so typical of Facebook to do it this way but I do make a little bit of money through the anazon res product
I make about $1,000 a month that's on I don't know probably around 30 million views which I've just realized I did not tell you about YouTube on YouTube I got around 40 million views on shorts last month on Hank's Channel and I made around $45,000 that's like a 10cent CPM that's up substantially over the course of the year so YouTube seems be getting better at selling ads hopefully that will continue to be the case and finally we've arrived at the big dog of the swipeable video platform world it's Tik Tok what the freak do they
want right now they are incentivizing two things the first is incentivized through the creativity program beta I think the creativity program beta is pretty dope except for the final word which is beta which to me implies don't expect this to not change when YouTube shares shorts Revenue it's sharing the money they're getting from advertisements on shorts and shorts are hard to monetize for a bunch of reasons they're really easy to skip you have to share the revenue between multiple videos the content is also short so you can't expect to make the same amount of money
from a 15-second long video that you would from a 10-minute long video obviously also important to keep in the back of your mind somewhere if you care about this stuff views mean different things to different people and we're about to discover that views can mean different things to the same people wild creativity program beta instead of sharing the ad Revenue with you it says hey we're going to give you a really high CPM on your content and we're not going to tell you why it's so high or how to get it higher but it's going
to be way higher than you are used to dealing with with the creativity program beta I'm making between 80 to 990 cents per thousand views which is a huge deal especially on a shorter piece of content which is where the caveat comes in which is that only videos that are over a minute long are in the creativity program beta so it is very clear that one thing Tik Tok is incentivizing is not just long content but longer content than the maximum length of the content that is allowed low on their most competitive platform YouTube shorts
it's such a fun situation for creators where the longest YouTube short you can make is a minute long and the shortest Tik Tok you can monetize is a minute and 1 second long I love it it's so fun it's just a Creator friendly world this video is brought to you by headspace one thing I've learned in this job and in this life is that you will often be going through it the way that you want the world to work will not be the way that it works and there will very likely always be a next
thing that wants your time and energy but if everything is a bunch of Gears all jammed together and there's no space for anything new to get in very little gets done at all to me a guy with a lot to do taking a moment for myself can often feel both counterproductive and selfish but it's neither of those things I can't do stuff if I don't also take care of myself headspace helps with that with creating space for all of it I don't think it's easy to be a person we are trillions of s all working
together to try and be one thing and that's not easy I really believe that it takes a fair amount of conscious effort to do it better one day than the next headspace exists to be not just one tool but many tools to help with that if you want to see how headspace might be helpful for you you can try it out completely free for 60 days all you got to do is sign up with my link in the description or scan the QR code on the screen right now and you can let me know in
the comments what you do to create a little extra space in your life it's good take a little break sometimes clears the head so what were we talking about Tik Tok seems to be sharing quite a lot of Revenue with creators if they make videos longer than a minute which means they can't use them as YouTube shorts now you can potentially reuse your over a minute long Tik toks on reals because they allow you to upload videos up to 90 seconds long but again the revenue share and the CPM there is much lower when I
first joined the creativity program beta I was making like 80 to 90 cents per thousand views on a Tik Tok longer than a minute and that was pretty good it's dropped since then it's between 50 and 60 cents now but even at 50 or 60 cents with the amount of views a lot of people get on Tik Tok like got I got like 37 million views last month that would be a huge amount of money like over $20,000 per month but don't expect that to be the actual number so first of all a lot of
those views are in content that's less than a minute long second it also has to be something called a qualified View and qualified views are anywhere between like 25% to 75% of views and it's not entirely clear why there basically probably two big qualifications first the amount of time it takes for Tik Tok to count something as a view is shorter than the amount of time that Tik Tok requires for it to be a monetized view I don't know exactly what these times are but basically it might count it as a view at 2 seconds
and a qualified view for monetization at like 15 seconds second almost definitely a qualified view requires the viewer to be in a market that has good advertising right now so if they're in the US they'll count as a qualified view if they're in Peru they will not count as a qualified view but even with all of that I am now making making way more on Tik Tok than I ever have before and I am making more content that is more than a minute long so Tik Tok is incentivizing longer content both because they don't want
creators to repurpose their content on YouTube and because they want longer content on the platform because that's how they move into YouTube space the same way YouTube is moving into Tik Tok space so if you are wondering for me if you average all of this out on YouTube when I get a share of all of the revenue generated by all YouTube shorts on YouTube I get a roughly 11 Cent CPM on 41 million views last month I made $4,400 Tok where only videos longer than a minute are monetized and I get some share of AD
Revenue I do not know what the percentage is but I get something and it might go away at any moment because they haven't said what it is and it's called the creativity program beta for me and this is going to be different for every person because you have a different proportion of videos longer than a minute to shorter than a minute I make a 10cent CPM last month I made $3,600 on 37 million views and on reals I don't know because I don't know how many views I get I made about $1,000 last month I
have no idea it could be anywhere from like maybe a 3-cent CPM to a 6-cent CPM which for clarity is still better than what I was making on Tik Tok a year ago but there is another thing that Tik Tok seems to desperately want and it makes sense to me because I think Tik Tok has realized that Tik toks are a bad way to make money for TiK ToK by which I mean as you can see from all of this stuff I'm making videos that are longer than a minute and I'm getting a 10-cent CPM
after a lot of time of them trying to figure out how to make it work Tik Tok is just a bad advertising platform and YouTube short is too and that's part of the reason why it's appealing for audiences because they're doing that content scroll if you can't swipe past an ad you're going to hate that Tik Tok user experience so ads always have to be swipeable there's no unskippable ads on Tik Tok and I can't imagine there ever will be maybe it'll happen it'll suck I would hate that so let me explain to you briefly
why Tik Tok is pushing very hard towards social commerce these are my cancer sucks I uh designed these while I was on chemotherapy and Tik Tok paid me $20 to sell them them every time I sold them which is wild kind of basically if these were purchased through Tik Tok shop and I encouraged people to do this you'd get 30% off and free shipping which basically added up to Tik Tok giving those purchasers like $20 of discounts that we didn't have to pay Tik Tok paid for those and I will attempt to explain to you
briefly why they did that Tik Tok is sticky everybody knows this you always want to watch another video that's why it is so successful but if Tik Tok is sticky and I'm buying an ad for my cancer socks then people are going to be unlikely to leave the platform to go buy socks on a website and so I'm going to have to pay a lot of money for every person I actually get to take that huge leap to not see the next Tik Tok in their feed which could be amazing TI Tock knows that this
is a problem for advertisers and it also knows that it can take this problem and turn it into an advantage by creating a Marketplace on the app which it has done it's called Tik Tok shop with Tik Tok shop you can watch a video from me and it will say buy now and you click and you're in Tik Tock shop and you can buy it without ever leaving the app extremely quickly you can see product pictures you can see reviews you can see all the things that You' see on the website you never have to
leave the app you just double click on your iPhone and you've purchased the cancer socks and we haven't set this up with the cancer socks and we might you can actually as a Creator go into like a little back-end Marketplace and see how much money you could make selling different products so you might be able to find some like bizarre seaweed pills and sell them and every time somebody buys them you make five bucks and if you make a really compelling Tik Tok about why people should buy the seaweed pills CU it's going to cure
your cancer or clear up your acne or both you might sell 10,000 of them and make $50,000 I use the example of the seaweed pills because that's literally something I saw I saw people telling me that the seaweed pills would clean up your acne which they won't and it linked directly to a Tik Tock shop thing for the seaweed pills that you could buy this is troubling when I do a brand deal the lawyers will are so annoying lawyers will prevent me from saying absolutely anything interesting but this way the brand has no idea what
content is being made so they're not responsible for any claims that the Creator makes in the video when they're selling the seaweed pills the seaweed pills sell themselves I just put them on the platform and we see what happens so Tik Tok shop has the potential to be I think a good thing for everybody you know like it's a better way to monetize Tik Tok creators can sell things from the Tik Tok shop and make commissions people can get exposed to new products that they might want to buy and Tik Tok of course takes a
cut right now they're only taking 5% which is to me like a perfectly reasonable amount to take I assume that's going to go up event but right now people are unused to using Tik Tok shop it's a very low friction way to buy things but not the first time the first time you're like is this legit and so you're going to buy something and make sure that it comes on time and make sure you get a good experience and that's going to be great and to get listed as like an authorized seller at dftba.com we
had to like jump through a bunch of Hoops and promise certain like times between order and shipment and people reaching out to customer support and reply they're really kind of Hardcore about that I would say less hardcore about promising quality products and indeed like this feels very Home Shopping Network right the products that are going to do the best on Tik Tok shop are the ones that creators will be able to find a way to sell and they will make a lot of money per sale to me that indicates maybe not the highest quality product
I mean if the creator has the product in hand and they're actually trying it out and they think it's a good product then I think that's fine but if they're just picking from a list of things and there's like one product that costs $15 and they make $10 every time they sell it a lot of people are going to try really hard to sell that product and maybe not do it in the way that's going to be best for the people buying it so because Tik Tok is not a great advertising platform they want to
instead turn it into a sales platform instead of being like YouTube which is ads and a subscription they're going to be something new which is ads and commerce and while subscription dollars are great Commerce dollars are also very good Amazon is big and getting even a slight piece of Amazon's market share would be a big deal for bite dance I think there's a lot more to this story especially when it comes to like the scammy way a lot of products are being sold right now now I've seen some that are like genuinely medically concerning but
I don't quite feel like I've done the due diligence yet to be able to talk about it and this video is already very long but overall if you use Tik Tok there's a good chance that you're among the folks for whom there are just a ton of Tik Tok shop links and a ton of ads now because Tik Tok is well into its process of having got you hooked on the platform and now is into the part of the process that we call inhi ification where the platform just gets worse and worse and worse as
it tries to use those hooks that it has in you to turn you into Revenue already clearly a less cool platform leaving space open for both Instagram and YouTube to take some market share away which has created all kinds of fun Dynamics in general my feeling is uh YouTube is a great place to make what I like to call Longs thanks for watching my YouTube long everybody hit that Thumbs Up And subscribe to Hank's Channel
