TikTok's Untapped Monetization Opportunity

TikTok’s biggest upside is not finding more viewers, it is teaching an already massive audience to spend money in more ways. Outside China, TikTok still monetizes mostly through ads, while Douyin and Kuaishou already pull meaningful revenue from live gifts, in app commerce, and merchant tools. That matters because ByteDance’s domestic engine is mature, while international revenue is growing faster and increasingly carried by TikTok, especially in the U.S.

• The gap is partly product mix. ByteDance describes its revenue model as ads, e commerce commissions, and live gifts, but TikTok spent years optimizing for engagement and user growth first. The later push into Creator NEXT, tips, video gifts, and LIVE monetization shows the playbook moving closer to Douyin’s more transactional model.
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• Douyin and Kuaishou show what higher monetization looks like in practice. Kuaishou generated RMB72.4B from ads, RMB37.1B from live streaming, and RMB17.4B from other services in 2024. ByteDance also notes Douyin has already built over $200B in GMV and large search traffic, which gives it more surfaces to place ads and close purchases inside the app.
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• This is why TikTok matters disproportionately to ByteDance’s next phase. ByteDance estimates TikTok U.S. at $27B of 2024 revenue and says international revenue reached about 25% of total 2024 revenue, up from 18% in 2022. In other words, the lower monetized business is also the one contributing a growing share of the company’s expansion.
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The next leg of growth is turning TikTok from an ad heavy attention app into a fuller commerce and creator earnings system. If TikTok keeps adding shopping, live selling, gifting, and better merchant tooling, international revenue can keep rising even if user growth slows, because each hour of attention will produce more dollars.