Where creators are currently making money on TikTok is through acting as non-playable characters (NPCs), derived from video games where creators perform as background characters from popular games, acting out repetitive phrases for gifts. In July, Montréal-based creator PinkyDoll told The New York Times that she made between $2,000 and $3,000 per livestream from in-app gifts that trigger mechanical responses. This kind of tipping, still a pretty nascent revenue stream in the U.S., was taking hold in China in 2015, said Canaves.
Yet the growth of TikTok Shop, which doesn’t break out how much of its sales are through livestreaming, is still very much on TikTok’s growth roadmap this year.
We’re already seeing examples where TikTok is aching for commerce content to promote, and smaller DTC brands are finding early adopter success. How else do you explain a stream selling a secondhand pencil reaching more than 1,200 people besides the algorithm funneling audiences to it?
Retailer livestreams beat social
But while social commerce is gaining more headlines, and more attention from younger audiences who don’t search on Google and are more comfortable with livestreaming trends from gaming platforms, it’s just one slice of the pie. Retailers’ livestreaming platforms generate more sales in China currently, with the social commerce share of livestreaming peaking in 2022 at 43.9%, per Insider Intelligence.
Retailers’ livestreaming efforts like Amazon Live, which launched in 2019, and Walmart Live are still pretty nascent in the U.S. Shoppers have to actively look for them, said Canaves, partly because Amazon encourages more transactional behavior, rather than surfacing new and trending products.
Arguably, Amazon could shift shopper behavior by more prominently prioritizing Amazon Live beyond running livestreaming events tied to Prime Day promotions, as long as it has the tech infrastructure in place and brands have enough inventory to manage surges in demand that a viral breakout creator could generate.
Source link
