How to Make Money on TikTok as a Streamer

If you already stream, TikTok is the second channel everyone tells you to be on, usually without checking whether its payout programmes are open where you live.

Mostly they are not. TikTok's main video payout programme runs in eight countries. If your account is registered in Canada, Australia, Ireland or most of the rest of the world, you cannot join it, and posting more does not change that. So this guide starts with what is open to you and only then explains how any of it works.

The other thing to know up front is that the TikTok Creator Fund is gone. It was replaced twice. A lot of the advice still online describes it, including the version of this page that sat here before today.

Checked against TikTok's Creator Academy, Help Centre, legal terms and newsroom on 19 August 2026.

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What changed since the Creator Fund

Start here if you have read a TikTok money guide before. These are the changes that make older instructions wrong rather than just dated.

Which programmes are open to you

TikTok publishes a country list for exactly two of its monetisation programmes. For the rest it says only that availability depends on where you live, and names no countries. That is worth stating plainly, because guides that present all of this as globally available are guessing.

Pick your country below. The two programmes with published lists will be marked. The rest stay unmarked, because the honest answer is that the only way to find out is to open TikTok Studio and see what appears.

Two results catch people out. Ireland has TikTok Shop but not the Creator Rewards Program, which is easy to get wrong because Ireland is in the EEA and has a seller portal. And Canada and Australia have neither, which leaves two large English-speaking streamer markets with gifting and brand deals as the only routes.

TikTok LIVE and the gifting economy

Live is where TikTok most resembles what you already do, so it is the obvious place to start. The gates are lower than the Creator Rewards Program and there is no country list to fail.

To go live you need to be 18 and have 1,000 followers. TikTok's Help Centre attaches "may vary across regions" to the follower rule, so treat 1,000 as the default rather than a constant. The age requirement moved from 16 to 18 back in November 2022, and to send or receive gifts you need to be 18, or 19 in South Korea. Government, politician and political party accounts cannot collect Diamonds at all. If you want the mechanics of actually starting a broadcast, our guide to going live on TikTok covers the app side step by step.

The economy works like this. A viewer buys Coins with real money, spends Coins on a gift during your stream, and you collect Diamonds. TikTok sells Coins on its own site as well as through the app stores, and says the web route is cheaper because it avoids a third party service fee.

What Diamonds are worth

Less than most articles claim, and TikTok will not tell you the number.

Three figures matter for working out gifting income: the price of a Coin, the value of a Diamond, and TikTok's cut. TikTok publishes none of them in a fixed form. Coin prices appear only at the point of purchase and vary by market. The Diamond conversion rate is described in the Virtual Items Policy as set by TikTok at a rate "to be determined by us from time to time in its absolute and sole discretion", with the explicit right to change or remove that rate whenever it likes. TikTok's share of gifting revenue is not published anywhere.

The rate you have seen quoted, usually one Diamond at half a US cent with TikTok keeping half, does not appear on any TikTok page. It circulated widely enough to become received wisdom, which is not the same as being true.

There is a further change that most guides have not caught up with. Since 22 January 2026 the US Virtual Items Policy has said that Diamonds do not automatically entitle you to a payment. Diamonds now measure popularity and ranking, and the Rewards Policy lists what actually feeds a payout: viewer engagement while you are live, how many days you went live, your league or ranking, and the quality and safety of the broadcast. So the mental model of Diamonds as tokens you cash in is no longer how TikTok describes its own system, at least in the US and the EEA.

So you cannot forecast gifting income, and anyone selling you a spreadsheet that does is selling you a guess. Withdrawals go to a bank account or PayPal from the Balance page, with a minimum you can adjust yourself and a maximum that varies by region. TikTok publishes neither figure and does not guarantee a processing time.

Super Fan

Super Fan replaced LIVE Subscription on 15 September 2025. It costs $9.99 a month everywhere, or the local equivalent, with no tiers. TikTok says it will reward creators with up to 50% of its Super Fan revenue after payment processing fees, and that the exact figure depends on how many subscribers you have.

Subscribers get a badge, an entrance effect, Super Fan only broadcasts and chat, and your Go Popular points double. If you already run a Fan Club, this is the piece that turns it into recurring income, and unlike the Creator Rewards Program it is not restricted to eight countries.

Going live from a PC

TikTok LIVE Studio is TikTok's own desktop broadcasting app, and it is still supported. Gaming creators can use it at 1,000 followers. Everyone else needs 10,000. To count as a gaming creator you have to have posted game related videos or gone live with game content on TikTok already.

There is a route around that threshold aimed squarely at people coming from Twitch or YouTube. TikTok publishes an application form for creators who do not meet the follower requirement but stream consistently on other platforms. If you have an established channel elsewhere, use it rather than grinding to 10,000 followers first.

LIVE Studio now runs on macOS as well as Windows, despite a TikTok FAQ that still says Windows only. OBS is explicitly allowed too: TikTok states it will not alter your traffic based on which streaming tool you use. TikTok's own guidance is 720p at 30fps as a floor and 1080p at 60fps as the target, with at least 30fps required for gaming content, and it actively discourages going above 1080p on the grounds that almost everyone watches on a phone.

TikTok does not publish a recommended aspect ratio for LIVE. Its settings documentation talks about ingest in landscape terms while telling you the audience is on mobile, so both work and neither is formally recommended.

Mirroring a Twitch stream to TikTok

Nothing in TikTok's rules forbids streaming to Twitch and TikTok at the same time. There is no simulcast policy and no exclusivity clause. What exists instead are three lines in the LIVE Monetization Guidelines that a mirrored stream walks straight into.

Content that carries someone else's visible watermark or superimposed logo counts as unoriginal and is ineligible for monetisation. Your Twitch alert box, your follower goal, your Twitch branded overlay furniture: on TikTok that reads as another platform's logo sitting on your broadcast. Pre-recorded or looping video presented as if it were live is also ineligible, which rules out running a VOD as a fake stream. And repeatedly directing viewers off platform is listed under content that lacks direct interaction, so telling your TikTok audience to go watch you on Twitch is itself a demonetisation trigger.

None of these get you banned. They restrict monetisation, temporarily at first and permanently if repeated, and you can check your current status in the app under Creator tools, LIVE Center, Rules and guidance, Restrictions.

The workable version is a separate scene collection for TikTok with the Twitch specific furniture stripped out. Same game, same camera, different overlay set, and a call to action that keeps people where they are. If you are running several platforms at once, our multistreaming guide covers the routing side.

Turning stream clips into posts that earn

Most streamers arrive with a folder of highlights and assume posting them is free money. Right instinct, wrong execution, because two rules cut through the standard clip pipeline.

The first is length, and the arithmetic here is unusually tight. A Twitch clip maxes out at 60 seconds. A video needs to run at least one minute to earn from the Creator Rewards Program. So a full-length Twitch clip sits exactly on the line and anything shorter, which is to say almost every clip anyone actually makes, falls below it. The classic 30 second highlight is invisible to TikTok's largest payout programme. It can still bring people to your channel, which is a perfectly good reason to post it. Just do not confuse reach with revenue.

The second is originality. TikTok reviews accounts for unoriginal content, which it defines as material copied from others or with minimal original input or edits, and it lists split screens, meaningless reactions and slide videos under a separate low quality heading. Its Creator Academy Originality Policy adds that repurposed content carrying a watermark or logo does not usually count as original, and the LIVE Monetization Guidelines say the same thing about another platform's visible logo. A raw clip exported with your Twitch alert box still in frame is the shape those rules describe. Five video violations in 30 days costs you programme eligibility.

What survives both rules is a longer edited piece built from stream footage rather than a slice of it. A one minute breakdown of why a play worked. Three attempts at the same boss with commentary recorded afterwards. Something cut, paced and narrated, where the stream is source material rather than the finished product. TikTok's Additional Reward is driven by watch time, retention and completion rate, so a 65 second video people finish is worth more than a three minute one they abandon.

The vertical problem

Stream footage is 16:9. TikTok is 9:16. Crop the middle out of a landscape frame and you lose about two thirds of the picture, including whichever corner held your camera and alerts.

Twitch has closed most of that gap, in two places.

Clips now come out of Twitch in both orientations. When a clip is created, Twitch auto-generates a portrait version alongside the landscape one, cropped to keep your camera and the gameplay in frame, and you can accept the suggestion, adjust it or throw it away. The portrait editor offers a stacked layout with a draggable divider between camera and gameplay, or a single full-frame box. Edit the layout once and Twitch applies that preference to every future clip of your channel. Both versions download, and you can post straight from Twitch to TikTok, though it will hashtag your channel name in the caption and you cannot remove it.

Then there is Dual Format, which Twitch launched to all streamers on 17 June 2026. One broadcast produces a portrait feed for phones and the usual landscape feed for desktop on a 1080 by 1920 vertical canvas. It needs OBS Studio 32.0.0 or newer with the Aitum Vertical or StreamElements plugin, or Streamlabs, Streamrun, XSplit or Meld, and it always requires Enhanced Broadcasting. Clips taken from a Dual Format stream exist in both orientations and do not expire, though the vertical version of the VOD itself is gone after seven days. Our guide to streaming on Twitch covers the setup and the bandwidth cost, which is the part people underestimate.

The part that matters if you sell or buy overlays is that the vertical canvas is not a crop. It is a separate canvas with its own scenes and sources, and Twitch tells streamers outright to build a few layouts for different games and content types. So a portrait scene is a second design job rather than a resize.

Twitch publishes a safe area diagram rather than pixel values, because the chat and controls it draws over your stream sit at different heights on different phones. Keep anything carrying information in the centre band, with generous room top and bottom. Do not put a chat widget on the vertical canvas at all, because Twitch adds one itself on mobile and says so twice in its own documentation. A webcam frame and an alert graphic are the pieces that carry over cleanly from a horizontal set, since both are small and can sit anywhere in the frame.

There is also a branding gap that opened up recently. Twitch removed the channel name it used to burn into exported clips, and has said it is still working out how to replace it. Right now a portrait clip leaves your channel unbranded everywhere except the TikTok hashtag. Whatever branding is in your scene when the clip is cut is the only branding it carries.

When you outgrow the free tier, the thing worth paying for is consistency across both layouts. Our stream overlay packages ship as matched sets, which is what stops a portrait scene looking like a different channel from the landscape one.

The Creator Rewards Program, in detail

This is the programme most people mean when they say "the TikTok Creator Fund", and almost every detail has changed.

To apply you need to be 18 or older, hold a public Personal Account, have at least 10,000 followers and at least 100,000 video views in the previous 30 days, and be resident in one of eight countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico or Brazil. Business Accounts do not qualify. Neither do accounts belonging to a government body, a politician or a political party. If you are on a Business Account you can switch in Settings and privacy, then Account, but you have to wait 30 days after switching before you can apply.

Then there is the rule that catches streamers. A video only earns if it runs at least one minute. That is the wording in the binding programme terms, so treat 60 seconds as the floor. The video also has to pick up 1,000 views on the For You feed and be 1080p or better, and it cannot be a Duet, a Stitch, a Photo Mode post, or anything carrying an ad, a paid promotion or a sponsorship.

Views are counted more narrowly than the number on your video. TikTok calls the ones that pay qualified views, and its published definition is a watch of at least five seconds, with repeat views from the same account collapsed into one, views where someone tapped "not interested" thrown out, and search traffic only counting if the viewer stayed 30 seconds. Fraudulent and paid views are excluded. So is any view from outside those eight countries. That last one is easy to miss and it matters: a video that goes wide in markets where the programme does not run earns nothing from those views, however good the numbers look in your analytics.

Payouts are made on the 15th of each month once you clear a $50 minimum, through PayPal's Hyperwallet, and you have to have filed tax information before anything moves. Below $50 the balance rolls, and TikTok's terms reserve the right to expire it.

The number TikTok does not publish

TikTok describes RPM as average gross revenue per 1,000 qualified views, and it explains what moves it: average watch time, retention at 30, 40, 50, 60 and 90 seconds, completion rate, and how often the video gets found through search. It splits your payout into a Standard Reward based on qualified views, weighted by where your viewers are and what language you post in, and an Additional Reward tied to how well the video held people.

What TikTok never states is the rate. There is no published dollars-per-thousand figure anywhere in its documentation. Every RPM number you have read in a blog post was either self-reported by one creator or invented. Treat all of them as unusable for planning.

Subscription and Series

Two smaller programmes are worth knowing about because they pay from your existing audience rather than from views.

Subscription is a monthly fee your followers pay for badges, subscriber-only videos, custom stickers and whatever perks you invent. You set the price anywhere from $2.99 to $99.99 a month, with $5.99 as the default. TikTok's published split is 70% to you after app store fees, with a further 20% bonus available that takes it to 90%. That bonus is assessed monthly and needs over 10,000 followers, over 100,000 video views in the previous calendar month, and either your first subscriber-only video that month if you have never posted one, or at least three if you have.

Subscriber-only posts cannot be Duets, Stitches or sticker creations, and they can only use copyright-free audio. For a personal account that means TikTok's Unlimited Sounds library. That rule alone rules out a lot of gameplay footage with music running under it.

Series is pay-per-collection: up to 80 videos, each up to 20 minutes, that viewers buy access to. Eligibility is 18 or over, 10,000 followers, an account at least 30 days old, three public posts in the last 30 days and 1,000 views in the same window. It suits a tutorial run rather than highlights, and if you have a genuinely teachable skill in your game it is the closest thing TikTok has to selling a course in-app. Two caveats. TikTok publishes no price range, no revenue split and no country list for Series. And Series does not appear on TikTok's own current list of monetisation programmes, which suggests it is being left to run rather than pushed.

TikTok Shop and affiliate commission

TikTok Shop lets you earn commission on products you feature in videos, in live streams or on a storefront attached to your profile. TikTok states the requirement as being over 18 and having a community on TikTok, and publishes no follower figure.

It runs in 19 markets: the US, Mexico and Brazil; Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Japan; and the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland. No Canada, no Australia.

For a gaming channel, Shop suits hardware and peripherals and very little else. Commission on a headset you actually use is a reasonable fit. Commission on whatever is trending is how a gaming audience learns to skip your videos. One structural detail applies in the US. After the divestiture, Shop and the ad business are run by a separate entity from the joint venture that handles Creator Rewards and LIVE, so these are different counterparties even though they share an app.

Advice that is now wrong

TikTok monetisation is one of the worst-aged topics on the web. These are the claims that show up constantly and are no longer true.

The Creator Fund. It was replaced, first by the Creativity Program Beta and then by the Creator Rewards Program, which TikTok took out of beta on 18 March 2024. Anyone still enrolled in the beta was moved across automatically. If a guide tells you to apply to the Creator Fund, nothing else in it has been checked since 2023 either.

The old country list. The Creator Fund ran in the UK, US, Germany, Italy, Spain and France. The Creator Rewards Program runs in the US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. Italy and Spain came off. Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil went on. Canada and Australia were never on either list.

Any video length. Under the Creator Fund a 15-second clip could earn. Under the Creator Rewards Program it cannot. One minute is the floor, and TikTok is explicit that this is the headline difference between the two programmes.

The TikTok Creator Marketplace. It no longer exists as a separate product. TikTok folded it together with TikTok Creative Challenge into TikTok One, which is now the single route to brand campaigns on the platform.

The TikTok Rewards referral programme, the one where you invite friends and collect points. Its page 404s. So do both of its legal terms pages. It appears in none of TikTok's current documentation, and TikTok never announced that it was ending it, which is why so many articles still list it. An earlier version of this page did too.

TikTok Pulse as a way for creators to earn. Pulse in 2026 is a suite of ad placements that brands buy, sold in four flavours. TikTok's 2022 announcement said it would begin exploring a revenue share with creators over 100,000 followers, and that sentence is still on the newsroom site four years later. Nothing since has confirmed the programme launched, no current TikTok page documents a creator split, and the widely repeated 50/50 figure does not appear on any TikTok property. It came from press briefings.

Published RPM rates. There are none. TikTok explains what affects your RPM and never says what it is.

Frequently asked questions

How many followers do you need to make money on TikTok?

It depends which programme. Going live and collecting gifts needs 1,000, though TikTok says that varies by region. The Creator Rewards Program, Subscription and Series all need 10,000. TikTok Shop publishes no follower figure at all, only that you are over 18 and have an audience.

Does the TikTok Creator Fund still exist?

No. It was replaced by the Creativity Program Beta and then by the Creator Rewards Program, which came out of beta on 18 March 2024. Existing members were moved across automatically. Any guide telling you to apply to the Creator Fund has not been updated in years.

How much does TikTok pay per 1,000 views?

TikTok does not publish a rate. It defines RPM as average gross revenue per 1,000 qualified views and explains what moves it, which is watch time, retention, completion rate and how often the video is found through search, but it never states a figure. Every per-thousand number you have read was either one creator's self-report or invented.

Which countries can join the Creator Rewards Program?

Eight: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and Brazil. Your account has to be registered in one of them. Views from outside those countries do not count as qualified views either, so a video that goes wide elsewhere earns nothing from that traffic.

Do TikTok videos have to be over a minute to earn?

For the Creator Rewards Program, yes. The binding programme terms say at least one minute, so treat 60 seconds as the floor. The video also needs 1,000 views on the For You feed, has to be 1080p or better, and cannot be a Duet, a Stitch, a Photo Mode post or anything sponsored.

How much is a TikTok Diamond worth?

TikTok does not say. The Virtual Items Policy reserves the conversion rate entirely to TikTok's own discretion and gives it the right to change it at any time. Since January 2026 the US policy has also stated that Diamonds do not automatically entitle you to a payment, and describes them as a measure of popularity that feeds into what you are paid rather than a balance you cash out.

When does TikTok pay you?

Creator Rewards Program payouts go out on the 15th of each month once your balance clears $50, through PayPal's Hyperwallet, and you have to have filed tax information first. Other programmes run on their own weekly, fortnightly or monthly cycles, all visible on the Balance page. The old Monthly Earnings page no longer exists.

Can I stream to Twitch and TikTok at the same time?

Yes. TikTok has no rule against simulcasting. What it does have is a monetisation rule against carrying another platform's visible watermark or logo, and another against repeatedly sending viewers off platform. Run a separate TikTok scene without your Twitch branding and without the go follow me on Twitch call to action.

Can I use OBS with TikTok LIVE?

Yes, and TikTok states it will not alter your traffic based on which streaming tool you use. TikTok also has its own desktop app, LIVE Studio, available to gaming creators at 1,000 followers and everyone else at 10,000, with an application route for people who stream consistently on other platforms.

Is TikTok still working normally in the US?

Yes. After the divestiture the US business closed into TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC on 22 January 2026, and the app is in both app stores. Creator Rewards, LIVE gifting and TikTok Shop all ran through the transition. US creator agreements were rewritten to name the new entity, but the eligibility rules and payout terms did not change.