How Much I Make on TikTok vs Shorts vs Reels (And What TikTok Wants)

[00:02] probably still use Tik Tok even though my state has banned it I'm going to have know everything that Tik Tok wants but I do know some things that Tik Tok wants they're not hiding it but I am going to cave out the whole conversation by

[00:17] 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

[00:31] 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

[00:45] party or the US government it is about the business of social media I just 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

[00:59] 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

[01:12] 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

[01:24] 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

[01:36] 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

[01:51] 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 made YouTube gets some record labels get some creators get some that's how it

[02:05] 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

[02:18] 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 a lot and there are structural reasons and we'll get into them why swipeable

[02:32] 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

[02:45] incentivize as far as I can tell is creators figuring it out on their own and not being so reliant on platforms to biased against meta because they seem to not understand at all that it would be

[02:58] 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

[03:11] reals and ads on Facebook and the way that it works is it shares revenue on a 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

[03:23] 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 ad where you're watching a video and you swipe and you see an ad it's actually

[03:38] 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 put them in a spreadsheet and look at the views but that doesn't count any of

[03:52] 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

[04:06] 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

[04:20] 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 better at selling ads hopefully that will continue to be the case and finally

[04:33] 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 is pretty dope except for the final word which is beta

[04:48] which to me implies don't expect this to not change when YouTube shares shorts getting from advertisements on shorts and shorts are hard to monetize for a skip you have to share the revenue between multiple videos the content is

[05:02] 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

[05:14] 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

[05:28] 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

[05:43] 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

[05:56] 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

[06:09] 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

[06:23] 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

[06:38] 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

[06:53] 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

[07:05] 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 can try it out completely free for 60 days all you got to do is sign up with

[07:19] 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 we talking about Tik Tok seems to be sharing quite a lot of Revenue with

[07:33] creators if they make videos longer than a minute which means they can't use them 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

[07:46] 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

[08:00] 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

[08:14] 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

[08:29] 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 might count it as a view at 2 seconds and a qualified view for monetization at

[08:45] 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

[08:57] I am now making making way more on Tik Tok than I ever have before and I am minute long so Tik Tok is incentivizing longer content both because they don't on YouTube and because they want longer content on the platform because that's

[09:11] how they move into YouTube space the same way YouTube is moving into Tik Tok 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

[09:25] 41 million views last month I made $4,400 Tok where only videos longer than share of AD Revenue I do not know what the percentage is but I get something because they haven't said what it is and

[09:39] for me and this is going to be different for every person because you have a 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

[09:55] 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 a year ago but there is another thing that Tik Tok seems to desperately want

[10:10] Tik Tok has realized that Tik toks are a bad way to make money for TiK ToK by 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

[10:25] Tik Tok is just a bad advertising platform and YouTube short is too and 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

[10:38] 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

[10:51] 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 were purchased through Tik Tok shop and I encouraged people to do this you'd get

[11:05] basically added up to Tik Tok giving those purchasers like $20 of discounts 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

[11:20] 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

[11:33] 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

[11:46] 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 it without ever leaving the app extremely quickly you can see product

[11:59] all the things that You' see on the website you never have to leave the app 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

[12:12] Marketplace and see how much money you could make selling different products so bizarre seaweed pills and sell them and every time somebody buys them you make should buy the seaweed pills CU it's going to cure your cancer or clear up

[12:27] 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

[12:40] 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

[12:56] 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 happens so Tik Tok shop has the potential to be I think a good thing for

[13:10] 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 buy and Tik Tok of course takes a cut right now they're only taking 5% which

[13:24] 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 the first time the first time you're like is this legit and so you're going

[13:37] comes on time and make sure you get a good experience and that's going to be 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

[13:52] 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

[14:06] sell and they will make a lot of money per sale to me that indicates maybe not the creator has the product in hand and they're actually trying it out and they that's fine but if they're just picking from a list of things and there's like

[14:21] one product that costs $15 and they make $10 every time they sell it a lot of 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

[14:36] 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

[14:50] even a slight piece of Amazon's market share would be a big deal for bite dance especially when it comes to like the scammy way a lot of products are being are like genuinely medically concerning but I don't quite feel like I've done

[15:02] the due diligence yet to be able to talk about it and this video is already very 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

[15:15] 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

[15:30] 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

[15:44] for watching my YouTube long everybody hit that Thumbs Up And subscribe to hit that Thumbs Up And subscribe to Hank's Channel