How to Make Money on TikTok

A Guide for TikTokers

If you are a teenager, there can be limited opportunities to earn cash for your skills. Some talented young musicians, though, have discovered how they can make money on Musical.ly. (Now TikTok)

For the benefit of anybody over the age of 21, we recently profiled Top 20 Musical.ly Influencers Who Have Built Small Media Empires for Themselves. In that article, we explained what Musical.ly is, and profiled some of the hottest young talents who star on the platform today.

If you are aged 25 or older you have probably never heard of Musical.ly. Yet it a major social media platform of choice for tweens and teens. It can claim than 200 million registered users. Its popularity is growing rapidly and there is a core of influencers developing on the platform. Musical.ly’s fans upload more than 13 million videos every day. If your market is tweens or young teenagers, then you should contemplate working with influencers on Musical.ly to expand your brand awareness. Musical.ly allows young performers to share short performance videos. The most popular of these are lip-sync videos, although members are now uploading more short videos of original content.

Musical.ly’s young fans are known as “musers”. If people like a muser’s performance they can pay them virtual tips with real money. 75% of the musers are female; 54% are aged between 13 and 24. Musical.ly provides live-streaming capability in the form of Live.ly. It has arrangements with all the major studios allowing performers to use their songs on the app. Musical.ly also has an arrangement with Apple Music. This allows their subscribers to play full songs from Apple's catalog on the platform. Many of these Musical.ly influencers have also earned fame on other social media channels, such as Facebook, SnapChat, and Instagram. The influencers near the top of this list can command fees of up to $300,000 per sponsored post. DMR has tried to curate statistics relating to Musical.ly, although as they observe, it can be much harder to find hard facts and figures about Muscial.ly than for the more prominent social networks. However, DMR reports that Musical.ly currently has 200 million users, 60 million of whom use the network each month. With an average of 13 million videos per day uploaded, Musical.ly’s young users love showcasing their talent. It must be remembered that many of these will be lip-synching copies of pop songs.

With all of this interest by 13-21 year-olds, it was inevitable that brands who target this demographic would take notice. This means that there are now income opportunities for the more talented, outgoing and influential of the youngsters.