‘The market for single attractive Asian guys is a lot bigger now’: monetization strategies of Asian Irish male TikTokers

Content creators of color on TikTok sit at the intersection of the growth in influence of the platform and its centrality to the global flows of racialized and gendered representations across the world. But how do content creators navigate between these two trends to monetize their content? I answer this by examining the experiences of a set of young Chinese and Filipino male TikTokers and analyze their use of four main strategies for monetization: 1) some content creators use the #Kpop hashtag to widen their audience, to attract followers and do paid product placements on TikTok; 2) others use their newly found social capital to access opportunities for professional photo creation off the app as professional photographers for K-pop adjacent companies; 3) still others use live streaming on TikTok to attract gifts directly from followers as a source of income; and 4) some, unhappy with the income from streaming on TikTok, instead used TikTok to redirect to other apps such as Amazon Wishlist and PayPal. I categorize these monetization strategies along to two key dimensions: social relations (based on visibility) and digitalization (monetizing on or offline).