When an Australian streamer told us she was making her living from fan donations on TikTok Live, it seemed like a sign of something new happening on social media.
It sparked an investigation that led ABC News Story Lab to an Australian who spent more than $300,000 in a single month on the app — all just given to strangers on the internet.
We also developed a way to track millions of dollars worth of gifts given on TikTok Live and visited a streamer at home while she was working.
Whenever a story like this is published, there’s plenty that doesn’t make the cut — not least, the behind-the-scenes of reporting and producing the finished product.
So, here are five key moments from the investigation, starting with its origins at a party thrown by TikTok itself.
The tip-off at a TikTok party
A hand-picked group of upcoming creators were milling about in the upstairs area of Brisbane’s Wickham hotel, looking around for faces they recognised.
The place was full of micro-celebrities, influencers and aspiring creators.
And it was time for the night’s headline act – TikTok’s reigning creator of the year Kat Clark and her teenage daughter Tisha were ready to step onstage to share the secrets behind their success.
But the boisterous crowd wouldn’t quieten down. There were too many distractions — cocktails and shots were flowing freely at the open bar, and a neon-lit wall adorned with TikTok logos was in near-constant use.
“Hello everyone on the live stream,” joked the MC, trying to snatch the creators’ attention away from their phones.
It was the first of many references to the live-streaming feature on TikTok throughout the night.
As we milled about afterwards, enjoying the finger food, a bloke in his 30s told us he’d recently quit his labouring job to give full-time streaming a crack. He figured it would let him spend more time with his kids.
Then Holly MacAlpine – who would ultimately feature in the story – mentioned that she had a single fan who was sending her roughly $1,000 a week in virtual “gifts”.
And, with that, the seed had been planted. We had a hunch that something very interesting was happening on TikTok Live.
The team behind the investigation, reporter Julian Fell, designer Teresa Tan, developer Ashley Kyd, and editor Matt Liddy will be here to answer your questions at 12:30pm AEDT today.
We’ll be joined by researchers Patrik Wikstrom, Crystal Abidin and Vasileios Stavropoulos.
Tell us what you thought of the story or ask the team your burning questions.
An inside look at life as a live streamer
After chatting with Holly on the phone in the weeks that followed, we made the trip down to visit her on the Gold Coast.
We wanted to see her in action — but not through the lens of her live stream.
Holly led us into the spare bedroom she used as a studio. She had a professional-looking set-up with a ring light, an audio mixer, and a phone stand.
It made sense that she’d invest in all this equipment — virtual gifts were her primary source of income.
She told us about the long hours she spent live streaming and why she believed her fans were supporting her financially.
They could watch her for free, after all. Gifts are completely optional on the app.
In her words, it’s because she’s created a community.
“Honestly, I’ll put my hand up and say like, I’m like one of the most like personable people on the app,” she said.
She said her fans supported her so she could spend long hours streaming with them.
“I do probably about the same amount of hours as a full-time job, but just that I have the absolute privilege of being able to do so at home.
“It’s literally objectively crazy that I get to lie on the beach [while streaming].”
Designing an experiment to find out how much money is really flowing …
Having seen a glimpse into one streamer’s life, we wanted to understand the bigger picture.
How many streamers were living off virtual gifts? How much money was TikTok taking as its cut?
In our research, we stumbled upon a tool used by streamers to play sound effects or flash the lights when they received expensive gifts.
Its potential for our purposes was immediately clear. If we could hook it up to every single stream that took place on TikTok Live, then we could record every gift given across the entire platform.
Daunted by the prospect of collecting so much data, we approached Patrik Wikstrom at QUT’s Digital Media Research Centre.
With a background in computational research, and having recently co-authored a book on TikTok, he was the perfect candidate to lend a hand. He hadn’t seen this tool before, and his eyes lit up when we showed him what it could do.
And, with that, Dr Wikstrom was in.
After a few months of planning, and a false start because of some technical difficulties, we were up and running.
Dr Wikstrom installed our tool on a constellation of servers he’d rented in the cloud, and he used them to monitor 84 top streamers from Australia and New Zealand over an entire month.
As part of that, he recorded:
- 2,236 live sessions
- 631 hours of streaming
- $1.9 million spent on gifts
Just as important as these overall figures was where all that money ended up.
… and where that money is going
At this point, we reached out to TikTok.
In response to a page of detailed questions, including about how much of the money goes to the streamers, we received a short statement.
In it, TikTok’s spokesperson said its gifting feature “not only makes the interaction more engaging but also allows creators to earn money”.
“Under the LIVE program, TikTok awards Diamonds to creators based on the popularity of their content and the virtual gifts received from their community. They can then exchange those for reward payments from TikTok,” it said.
It didn’t provide any specific details about TikTok’s cut of the earnings. Once again, we had to get creative and figure it out for ourselves.
So, we purchased 50 coins from the TikTok website, which cost us $0.93.
Then we sent an ABC colleague two roses and a doughnut – gifts worth 50 coins.
When they went to cash out their earnings, they had $0.37 in their account.
That let us calculate TikTok’s cut as being about 60 per cent of money spent on gifts. Some streamers we spoke to said it was closer to 70 per cent – and that the rate changed based on the streamer’s popularity.
But our more conservative estimate was that TikTok kept $1.1 million. And that would mean the 84 streamers were left with $750,000 between them.
Who’s giving money to strangers on the internet — and why?
So, we had an answer for where this money went. But what about where it came from?
Holly put us in contact with a few of her most generous gifters, and we also reached out to some of the accounts that ranked highly in the data we collected.
The people we spoke to were a real mix; men and women, young and middle-aged, wealthy and middle-class.
But what they told us had a common thread — they’d gotten addicted to the feeling of giving money on TikTok Live.
“I’ve been trying to give it up for the last six months,” said one gifter in his mid-40s who gave more than $300,000 in a month.
Aimee Karim estimated spending between $35,000 and $45,000 in under a year on gifts – an experience she likened to being “sucked into the wormhole”.
“It’s so easy to just sit there in company and pump money and pump money,” she said.
To put their experiences into context, we spoke to Vasileios Stavropoulos, an expert in social media and gaming addiction at RMIT.
He told us the tendency for users to get addicted was, in part, due to the design of the app.
Dr Stavropoulos said that by mixing the adrenaline of gambling, the bonds formed with avatars in games, and the connection from social media, TikTok Live was a “hybrid” app, rather than purely a social media app.
“Of course, the mix, the ingredients, the recipe becomes more attractive when these elements are combined,” he explained.
Crystal Abidin, founder of the TikTok Cultures Research Network, made it clear that what was happening on TikTok Live wasn’t an anomaly.
All of this had been popular in China for years now, she explained, before citing examples of features being replicated in other apps.
She pointed to Instagram copying the transient “story” feature from Snapchat.
“Instagram, again, is famous for ‘stealing’ or taking inspiration from other apps by allowing short videos and lives,” Dr Abidin added.
In the days before publishing our findings, YouTube made an announcement that echoed this and showed how we’d been onto something from the start.
YouTube Shorts was getting a vertical live-streaming feature, complete with real-time fan donations.
It looks like the success of TikTok Live might be the start of something new on social media.
Remember to come back at 12:30pm AEDT and have your questions answered by the team and the experts we spoke to in reporting the story.