Creator Monetization @ TikTok

Monetization is a top priority for creator satisfaction and retention, but the space has gotten very competitive with other platforms, oftentimes with ad revenues they can share. To establish TikTok as the best place to create content and build a community, our team is tasked with creating a diverse set of monetization features to help creators make money; typically shipping out MVPs within two months.

As the Sr. Content Design lead, I work with my global cross-functional team to brainstorm new features, collaborate with design on UX, determine messaging and its components, write all microcopy and UI text, own naming decisions for new features, and manage strings in our backend platform. I also created a vertical-specific writing guide for future content designers to understand our user needs and business goals, learn design-specific best practices, demonstrate how to scale voice and tone, and outline vertical-specific terminology and legal guidelines for transactional-language.

Creator Tools

Our mission is to offer economic opportunities for all creators that inspire creativity, bring joy, and provide value to our users. To stay competitive with other platforms, my team created exclusive features and tools to help creators grow and monetize on TikTok, including: Tips, which allows viewers to send monetary tips directly to creators through their TikTok profile; Video Gifts, which enables viewers to purchase virtual “gifts” to send to a creator’s video to show appreciation for the content; and Shoutouts, which provides viewers with the opportunity to request and purchase personalized videos from creators for any special occasion.

TikTok Series

TikTok Series is a new feature that allows creators to create and sell collections of premium video content (think Udemy, Patreon, Masterclass) and earn incremental income on the platform. The decision to build this new offering was made with insight that creators on TikTok are directing their audiences to rival paid platforms or adding a link-in-bio with paid courses to their profile. In my role, I was the vertical lead for content design overseeing the creator dashboard and owning the consumption side of the experience for all design, content components, and UX writing. I also facilitated two team “namestorms” for the new feature, with one of my suggestions being selected as the official name.

Event Ticketing

In partnership with Ticketmaster, I helped create a new feature that enables creators to promote and sell tickets to their events (e.g. concerts, sporting events, comedy shows), and allows users to purchase these tickets on the sound details music page within TikTok. The goal was to create additional creator monetization opportunities and increase publish rate from top creators in strategically important categories like music, sports, and comedy. It also helped us create a new revenue stream for TikTok via rev share from ticket sales.

In-app Promotion Experiment

We created a limited-time experiment with a 'top performers' model to understand whether fewer creators receiving a higher guaranteed payout will result in increased satisfaction compared to our current model of Creator Fund, which pays more creators in a lower lump sum. Our metrics included publish penetration, public count per creator, total/median/average video views per post by creator, and active days per creator.

My design partner and I created the majority of the design requirements and logic, including how to describe the promotion, showcase analytics data, include other value add content and actions, and communicate final results of the promotion.

creation hub Experiment

Research in May ‘22 showed that some new users reported a feeling of overstimulation when navigating the app for the first time, and were dropping off shortly after visiting the “shoot” page. To see if we could impact engagement and retention, my PM, designer partner, and I used that insight to develop an experiment: a simple and guided “gamified” onboarding hub that helps new users learn the functionality of the platform, while earn badges after achieving certain milestones on the creator journey.