🔴 TikTok Changes The Gift System

Hey, it’s Harry.

Welcome back to the streaming and content journey.

Firstly, yes it’s been a month since the last edition. I’ve struggled to get an edition out. That’s life for ya. 😅

Anyway, this one is BIG and controversial…

📰 In Today’s Edition

• 🤑 TikTok is changing the gift payout structure and people aren’t happy

• 🔔 How to properly set up TikTok LIVE alerts

• 🚫 Are you shadow-banned?

• 🎬 MrBeast’s insane Beast Games prize pool

💰 TikTok Rolls Out Controversial Changes To Gift Payouts

Last week in the US, TikTok started rolling out a new payout system for TikTok LIVE. They’ve named it Scaled LIVE Rewards. Many people are understandably not happy.

How It Works

Before 10th Feb, US creators got 50% of the value of their TikTok LIVE diamonds. Typically 0.5 cents per diamond. No questions asked.

Now, the cut for US creators could be as low as 20%! The payout for your diamonds is now based on “Per-LIVE Missions” (PLM) and “Weekly Missions” (WM). Here’s a brief overview:

• If you stream for less than five minutes, your gift cut is only 20%. This scales up to >25 minutes where it reaches 38%. (PLM)

• Scaled rewards of up to 2% if you gain five or more followers. (PLM)

• 6% if you stream once over 25 minutes or 8% if you stream two times or more. (WM)

• 1% extra if you reach 10 team members scaling to 2% extra for 2,000 or more team members. (WM)

• 1% for staying in the A Creator League or 3% for reaching your highest-ever league capped at $1,000. (WM)

These percentages stack, up to a new maximum of 53%.

The Controversy

TikTok’s 50/50 split was already an industry-low. Now, it’s likely to be even lower on average. There are two main reasons for that.

Any breaches of the rules may reduce your cut by up to 20%. In a worst-case scenario where you stream less than five minutes, you get 0% of gift revenue. TikTok wants you to follow their LIVE Monetization Guidelines and Community Guidelines. However, we all know that these have never been fairly or equally enforced, many of the rules are very vague and TikTok’s AI moderates streams very poorly. I’m already seeing examples, such as IceTalks, where 20% of revenue has been lost for no good reason.

Not everyone will be able to hit these goals. A single 25-minute weekly stream will net you a 44% cut. What concerns me most though is the Weekly Missions (WM). Only a dedicated creator would be able to consistently climb the Creator Leagues or hit 2,000 team members. TikTok is punishing the casual creator, which is the majority of streamers on TikTok LIVE.

My Closing Thoughts - “Never charge for something that was previously free”.

I understand the goal. TikTok wants to encourage people to consistently stream while building a loyal fanbase. It’s a noble goal but the implementation is horrendous. One person even made a petition against it!

Here’s what should have happened: Copy Twitch. Twitch starts at a 50/50 cut and then provides incentives through the Plus Program to reach up to 70/30. Given that TikTok’s cut was already an industry low (Kick is 95/5 and YT is 70/30) this was a chance for TikTok to raise that in a sustainable way. They failed.

For now, these changes only affect US creators but you can almost certainly expect a worldwide rollout in the coming months unless TikTok changes their mind.

As a final side note: I’ve not even mentioned the fact that both Apple and Google take 30% of your viewer’s money. The cuts we spoke about here are after this has happened. Always direct your viewers to tiktok.com/coin where they can buy coins for cheaper and if they have a VPN tell them to try Brazil.

🎬 Weekly Video

My 2025 TikFinity deep dive is out now. TikFinity remains the best alerts system for TikTok LIVE and is designed to increase your engagement.

Popular features include sound alerts, text-to-speech and alerts for new subs, follows and gifts but my deep dive shows how to set up any aspect of TikFinity. Timestamped of course!

🚀 Live Success Academy

The Live Success Academy (LSA) is the home of my private community of livestreamers.

Our goal is simple: We’ll help you build a loyal community which means you earn more.

Join today and instantly unlock:

• 📆 Weekly calls with Harry and the community. (I charge agencies $150 for this).

• 🎬 Private video content to help your growth.

• 📰 Daily posts packed with advice from Harry and the community.

• 🧠 Private community of like-minded livestreamers

• 🤑 Exclusive discounts including our biggest-ever TikFinity discount. ($30+ in savings).

• 🔑 Advice about stream keys, TikFinity and all broadcasting software. (Guaranteed reply).

📜 Post Of The Week

You are not shadowbanned. On any platform. Your content is just not good enough when compared to your competitors.

🎯 Bullet Point News

A bit more news than usual today, due to the one-month break this newsletter took!

🎬 Beast Games Season One concludes with a historic $25M in prizes given away by Jimmy. I strongly recommend this if you have Prime Video. It genuinely gets better with every episode. The final episode is insane!

🎉 Valkyrae celebrates 10 years of streaming.

💰 Shroud raises over $1M for charity during his Fragathon.

🔴 Streamlabs Desktop now has TikTok LIVE chat embedded.

🛰 NASA announces their first-ever Twitch stream. Better late than never!

🎙 Pokimane and Kai Cenat attend The Grammy Awards.

🟣 Self-paid Twitch subs (i.e. not Prime or gifted) dropped by over 12% year on year in 2024.

🟢 Kick adds the ability to rewind livestreams in real time alongside announcing new Streamlabs and StreamElements integrations.

🎵 MrBeast joins the bidding to buy TikTok.

𝕏 Twitter/X adds dockable livestreams with chat.

👋 Thanks for reading!

Harry