TikTok Does Twitch-Like Subscription

Amiel Rose Andres - January 21, 2022
TikTok Does Twitch-Like Subscription

It’s been discovered that TikTok is exploring paid subscriptions similar to Twitch, giving its creators even more options to generate money from their work.

TikTok has quickly established itself as a platform for helping to create a new generation of online stars that have taken over various social media platforms over the previous two years. While some of the most well-known users of TikTok have benefited from outside opportunities, they have also been able to make money directly from TikTok.

TikTok recently added a direct contribution option for profiles to their large creator fund, building on the prior live broadcast gifts they’d implemented. They’re now working on profile subscriptions that look like Twitch subscriptions, which is a significant step forward. TikTok has started supporting the paid subs option with a tiny testing pool of accounts that you probably won’t be able to find on your For You Page, according to TechCrunch and The Information. 

At the moment, it’s unclear how the option would function and whether or not creators who use it would put their entire content behind a membership paywall if they used it. 

Subscribers on Twitch, for example, get benefits like no advertising and exclusive chats, but this wouldn’t work on TikTok. To make some content restricted to the paywall, Twitch streamers can offer subscriber-only streams, which could be one avenue for TikTok to go down. 

According to the sources, it’s unclear when the test will be expanded to include users. Previous tests, like the direct donations, required a channel to meet certain requirements before being granted access, such as a follow count and video likes. In the case of subscriptions, this might very well be the case again, but for the time being, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

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