• TikTok is letting go of some US staff on its e-commerce team, five employees told BI.
• The cuts are hitting its governance and experience team, which handles Shop marketplace safety.
• TikTok made cuts to its global trust and safety team earlier this year.

TikTok is letting go of some US e-commerce staff today as part of a restructuring of its governance and experience team, five employees at the company told Business Insider.

E-commerce governance and experience, called GNE for short, is a global team that handles marketplace safety for users, sellers, and creators within TikTok Shop. The group manages tasks like seller compliance, monitoring product listings, and protecting intellectual property.

Business Insider wasn't able to immediately learn the scale of the job cuts.

A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment.

TikTok's broader US e-commerce team has been under pressure from global leadership this year after failing to meet performance expectations in 2024. The organization's top executive, Bob Kang, called out the team during a company all-hands meeting in February, BI previously reported. Some employees in the group received low scores during annual performance reviews in March, leading to performance-improvement plans and, in some cases, exits with severance.

This month's layoffs follow a February round of cuts to TikTok's global trust and safety team, which Reuters first reported. This group handles tasks like content moderation on a broader set of user videos that don't necessarily involve shopping.

The job cuts arrive at a moment of flux for TikTok as it reckons with a 2024 law that required its owner ByteDance to divest from its US app. After ByteDance failed to comply, TikTok briefly shut off in the country. President Donald Trump has since directed his attorney general not to enforce the law.

Trump said this week the company was close to reaching a deal to address the divestment requirements, but it fell apart after the US levied new tariffs on China. The Chinese government, like the Trump administration, would need to approve the deal. TikTok may become a bargaining chip amid broader trade negotiations.

A ByteDance spokesperson told BI on Friday that it was in discussions with the US government regarding a potential solution for TikTok in the US, but an agreement had not been executed, and any agreement would be subject to approval under Chinese law.

• A string of US executives has left TikTok in the past year.
• The departures are creating a management vacuum that Chinese leaders are filling, insiders told BI.
• TikTok is under political pressure to separate its US business from its China-based owner ByteDance.

The Trump administration is racing to curb TikTok's ties to China. But inside the company, a string of recent US executive departures and team restructurings has given Chinese leaders a greater grip on its American business, company insiders told Business Insider.

This month, US-based sales and marketing exec Blake Chandlee, who served as the face of TikTok at key industry events like Cannes and Advertising Week, stepped down. Will Liu, known as Liu Xiaobing in China, is taking over management of his global business solutions team. Liu, a Singapore-based staffer who reports to ByteDance China chairman Zhang Lidong, works on monetization products for the company's Chinese apps and TikTok.

The sales team shakeup is one example of a broader shift in power across several company departments.

TikTok made a big push to hire top talent in the US as it looked to launch new businesses like e-commerce in the country. But over the past year, at least seven key US-based executives, including Chandlee, have left their roles across various business lines. Some have been replaced by Chinese leaders. There's a sense among some of TikTok's roughly 7,000 US staffers that ByteDance executives who are either based in China or have come to the US from China are tightening control. Business Insider spoke to nine current and seven former staffers who have worked at the company in the past year.

"They have been consolidating under Chinese leadership," a TikTok employee who works on its e-commerce business told BI. "Before we had a senior manager in the US, and now the person is outside the US."

TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

The leadership balance may change again if TikTok finds a new owner outside ByteDance, as required by a divestment law. The Trump administration is working on a potential deal, and the president wrote on Friday that he was giving the company another 75 days to find a solution. Some employees are eager for a switch that would put new US executives in charge.

"I really hope this happens," a staffer who works in operations said of a prospective sale. "I hope it can be new leadership if they can really get bought by Oracle or someone else."

A slow drip of exits

While staff at TikTok's parent company ByteDance have had the final say over its product for years, and US leaders like North America global business solutions head Khartoon Weiss remain, the 16 insiders felt that the recent departures of other top US managers expanded control of Chinese leaders.

TikTok's e-commerce team, which runs its Shop product under the leadership of China-based ByteDance executive Bob Kang, has lost several US leaders over the last year and a half, according to nine of the insiders.

Since late 2023, US executives that have exited include Sandie Hawkins, TikTok's former GM of US e-commerce; Marni Levine, one of Hawkins' two replacements, who oversaw TikTok Shop's US operations; and Mary Hubbard, the company's former head of governance and experience in the Americas for Shop.

Executives with experience working on TikTok's Chinese sister app are filling the void, including Mu Qing, a former Douyin e-commerce VP; Sheng Zhou, the company's SVP of global e-commerce; and product VP Xu Luran.

TikTok recruited heavily from Amazon and other big e-commerce players when it began testing Shop in the US a couple of years ago, bringing local knowledge into the business, insiders said. But in the past year, as US executives have left, leadership has shifted from building a localized shopping product to instead trying to imitate Douyin, a staffer who works on TikTok Shop told BI.

Chinese leadership is also cracking down on its US team this year after they felt the country underperformed in 2024, as BI previously reported.

Other US teams within TikTok have similarly seen American leaders swapped out for ByteDance staffers from China.

There have been examples of these power shifts as early as 2022. Vanessa Campos, a former TikTok recruiter focused on early career hires who left the company this year, wrote in an April blog post that her US manager was replaced by a global leader from China in late 2022 who began "tightening their grip on hiring priorities." Chinese leadership led the early careers team from that point forward, Campos told BI.

Rebecca Sawyer, TikTok's US advertising lead for small and midsize businesses, was replaced by ByteDance executive Qing Lan in late 2023. Qing previously worked on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin.

The e-commerce staffer said Chinese leadership's control of the business "hyper-accelerated" in the second half of 2024.

Globally, at least eight executives have left TikTok in 2025, The Information earlier reported, citing departures like the music exec Ole Obermann and North America ads leader Sameer Singh.

As more Chinese managers take charge, US staffers feel left out of the loop

ByteDance is still very much a Chinese tech company at its core. Decisions about its global products are often made in China, where it has offices in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou. US TikTok employees previously told BI that they refer to its Beijing office as "HQ."

As it's expanded into other parts of the world, ByteDance has brought hundreds of employees over from China into its new offices via H-1B or L-1 visas, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services records and another company employee with knowledge of its visa strategy.

About 670 of the roughly 1,100 approved US H-1B visa hires for TikTok and ByteDance workers were from China during fiscal year 2023, the most recent period BI was able to obtain data via a Freedom of Information Act request. In fiscal year 2022, the company received 445 H-1B approvals for Chinese nationals, per USCIS data shared with US Sen. Tom Cotton.

"A lot of leaders are Chinese nationals from mainland China," the employee with knowledge of its visa strategy said.

But the company also grew TikTok globally by leaning into the expertise of local hires. Business lines like recruiting, the creator outreach team, and its sales staff that interface with US marketers have generally operated with less oversight from China, four of the current and former staffers said. Staff members in some of those divisions have not had to take late calls with Chinese colleagues to accommodate time zone differences, for example. That independence from China has drifted away in the past year, the insiders told BI.

In 2024, TikTok's US creator team was asked to align its goals with a product team mostly based in China, a former staffer who worked on the creator team told BI.

"While we weren't actually reporting into them, it was almost like a dotted line," the ex-employee said. "If they said jump, the creator team had to jump."

US employees reporting to managers based in China told BI they sometimes feel excluded from the team, either because they don't speak or read Mandarin Chinese or because they work in a different time zone and are unable to join certain calls.

A trust and safety team member who does not speak Mandarin said it was challenging to try to work with Chinese colleagues who, they felt, often made little effort to accommodate their US teammates.

The staffer said they'd been provided with some internal documents translated from Mandarin that have been hard to follow.

"I'm always two days behind," they said.

Another staffer on the engineering team estimated their China-based manager had directly spoken to them for less than 30 minutes over the last six months.

The employee said it was challenging to work with translated documents and group chats in the company's internal messaging platform Lark that were originally written in Mandarin.

"The meetings conducted are in Chinese as well, so a lot of my American colleagues can't understand the context," this person said.

A former product staffer said they felt like it was harder to get their ideas heard after switching from a US-based manager to one based in China.

"I felt like they didn't really listen to the US opinion," the former employee said of their new manager. "They would say things like 'Just follow what the Chinese product manager said.'"

A TikTok sale in the US could shake up the company — if it actually shifts who is in charge

The power structure for TikTok's US business may shift in the coming weeks if new owners take over operations.

The company could reach a deal to sell TikTok's US assets in order to comply with the law requiring ByteDance to divest from its US app. Trump said TikTok negotiations are now wound up in a broader US-China trade fight over tariffs.

ByteDance said it's talking to the US government about a potential solution, but key matters need to be resolved, and an agreement would be subject to approval under Chinese law.

As staffers await a political resolution, morale at the company is low among some who are experiencing burnout and dealing with the aftermath of a recent review cycle that led to performance-improvement plans and staff exits, company insiders previously told BI.

"We essentially haven't had a voice for a very long time," the second e-commerce worker said. "They say they want you to be candid and clear, but really they want you to fall in line and follow the Chinese and rebuild Douyin."

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at dwhateley@businessinsider.com or Signal at @danwhateley.94. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Ashley Rodriguez and Shubhangi Goel contributed reporting.

April 7, 2025 — This story was updated with new details on a potential deal involving TikTok's US assets.

• Creator startup Spotter held its first upfront-style event Thursday, matching YouTubers with marketers.
• Creators like Ryan Trahan and Jordan Matter pitched brands on sponsoring future videos.
• Several of the creators made the case that parasocial fandom is a great way to sell stuff.

Hey brands, want to sponsor my daughter's 16th birthday?

That was the pitch YouTuber Jordan Matter threw out to a room full of marketers on Thursday during creator startup Spotter's first upfront-style event. The showcase was an opportunity for YouTubers like Matter, Dude Perfect, Ryan Trahan, and MrBeast to lay out their content slate for the coming year. The goal? Woo brands into buying ads on their videos.

For Matter, who posts content with his family, the big upcoming tentpole event was his daughter Salish's 16th birthday. "Anybody represent any automobile manufacturers here?" he asked the crowd.

He pointed out that Salish's birthday falls in the fourth quarter, a time when brands are shelling out their biggest ad budgets. "Lucky us," Matter said.

The creator-run presentations mirrored the annual upfront pitches from TV broadcasters or NewFront sessions hosted by digital platforms like Snapchat and TikTok. But several of the creators who took the stage at Spotter's event were pitching something slightly different: their obsessively loyal, parasocial audiences. (Parasocial relationships are when fans imagine they have a friendship with a celebrity they don't personally know.)

"An influencer invites you into their home every week, and you feel like you're a part of their family," Matter told the crowd. "They have such a deep connection with their audience that transcends, I think, kind of anything you can find elsewhere."

Once you have that level of fan loyalty, you can sell almost anything. Perhaps, that makes your content a better place to put ads than a traditional TV or streaming show. That's at least what Spotter hoped the marketers would take away from the event.

"Let's be clear, creators are the networks of today," Spotter's president Nic Paul told the crowd. "They are delivering the hit shows that are attracting audience attention at scale."

YouTube was the biggest platform for US TV viewing in February, ahead of companies like Netflix, Disney, and Fox, per Nielsen's "Media Distributor Gauge," which looks at viewership across cable, streaming, and other distributors.

Some of the Spotter creators' shows could comfortably live on traditional television. During the presentations, YouTuber Airrack announced plans to climb Mount Everest for a coming video project. Creators Sam and Colby are planning to drop a new paranormal video series. Creator Kinigra Deon said she's putting together a movie in collaboration with Kevin Hart's entertainment company. And Melissa Drucker, MrBeast's global brand partnerships lead, took the stage to talk about the return of his Amazon series, "Beast Games."

But others, like Matter, pitched content that veered deeper into their personal lives.

YouTuber Rebecca Zamolo, who has over 18 million subscribers on her main YouTube channel, was looking for brand partners for a back-to-school-themed video series that would overlap with the birth of her second child, for example.

"Baby No. 2 will also be arriving when back to school hits, so, even more of a reason for our audience to be excited and to increase engagement even more," she said.

Zamolo said she earlier used a blue can of Poppi in a sponsored video to reveal the gender of her next child to her daughter.

Creators are uniquely positioned to sell stuff

Sponsoring a video about a birthday, wedding proposal, or childbirth is certainly not new in the influencer business.

But there was something a little jarring about hearing a father court brands for "integrations" tied to his teenager's birthday.

That said, he makes a fair point that Salish's deeply loyal follower base, combined with YouTube's growing market share among TV viewers, positions her and the rest of the creator cohort very well to sell stuff.

For example, MrBeast makes more money from selling his Feastables chocolates than he does from his videos, Bloomberg reported, citing company documents sent to investors.

Trahan made a similar point when he talked about converting his 19.4 million subscribers into strong evangelists for his candy brand, Joyride.

"My audience is on a mission to make it a top-selling candy in Target," Trahan told the Spotter crowd. "This is such a great example of what can happen whenever you give the creators an opportunity to tell their audience a mission that they believe in."

• Blake Chandlee, a TikTok advertising leader, is stepping down next month, per a company memo.
• Chandlee is being replaced by a product executive, Will Liu, as part of a company reorganization.
• Chandlee said he expects to stay with the company in an advisory role.

Blake Chandlee, a top advertising executive at TikTok, is stepping down from his leadership role at the company next month, according to a memo sent to staffers on Monday.

Chandlee's departure is part of an internal reorganization that will merge TikTok's ads and marketing organization, called the global business solutions team, with its global monetization product technology team.

Will Liu, who currently oversees that monetization product team, will lead the combined group. Chandlee will remain affiliated with the company in an advisory role, he wrote in the memo.

Chandlee did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Khartoon Weiss, meanwhile, will oversee the global business solutions team in North America, in addition to leading its global agency and accounts team, a company spokesperson told Business Insider.

Chandlee's departure comes at a tenuous moment for TikTok. The company is currently reckoning with a divest-or-ban law that requires its owner, ByteDance, to separate itself from its US app. The app is operating in the US based on an executive order that gave TikTok until April 5 to sort out a political resolution with the Trump administration.

The move follows other recent departures from executives, including Ole Obermann, the company's global head of music business development.

Read Chandlee's full memo below:

Hey all,

As Shou has just shared, as we strive towards 2025 goals and beyond, we have had many discussions about the future of the business and how to continue transforming our model. Notably, how we continue to move faster together in continued development of automated capabilities and deep integration into planning systems, TikTok Shop, and measurement & ecosystem partners.

As our offerings become more technical and our client product solutions become more sophisticated to provide even more value, it is important that Global Business Solutions (GBS) and Global Monetization Product Technology (GMPT) operate increasingly hand-in-hand. To enable this, I have decided it's best to streamline under one department lead and will be scaling back my day-to-day role to an advisory one. Leaders of both organizations will report directly to Will Liu, effective April 1. I want to take this opportunity to share my perspective with you on why I believe it is the right decision moving forward.

Reflecting on the last six years, we have built something that has never been built before. In 2019, I joined a start-up whose user base was growing fast based on a simple concept of short form video combined with music, creating a unique entertainment experience. A small group of us, split between shared working spaces in NY, London, and LA were tasked with figuring out how to engage with this audience and introducing ads into the mix to create the first ads business on TikTok. We didn't have a name, but came up with Global Business Solutions as it sounded impressive, and thus formed GBS.

That humble beginning has turned into the fastest growing ads business in the world (outside of Douyin), achieving our current revenue levels two years ahead of Meta and four years ahead of Google. And we are not done yet, as we ambitiously target 50% growth again in 2025. To be clear, this has not been a linear process. We have encountered a ban in India, a global pandemic where we all worked from home for two years, geo-political headwinds, wars in Ukraine and Middle East, increased regulatory oversight, and more. All that said, the things we have always focused on are our clients and how we can best deliver business outcomes for them based on the tools and products we had at each point in the journey. Remember, as we were building GBS, the product and engineering teams were rapidly building capabilities for our clients to identify, reach, engage, and measure our global audiences. This focus on building relevant and impactful solutions for clients has fueled our teams around the world, large and small. Along with the trust each of YOU have built with your clients, agencies, and partners, this combo has been the foundation of this growth and will continue to be.

Will and I were spending a lot of time thinking how we can communicate better, deliver client feedback faster, launch products more smoothly, be more transparent and accountable, and ultimately learn and iterate to get to market faster. What became more obvious was that our structure was slowing us down. I have always encouraged our teams to think differently, be transformative, and not let the past limit the future. By aligning the GBS org directly with the product org, we can truly move as one team. Will is an exceptional product and eng leader who has built strong teams and products globally. He is respected by the sales leaders and has a true focus on delivering best in class solutions for our clients. This change is an example of Will and I eating our own dogfood. We are being disruptive to allow for the success of the business. To be clear, this is not a traditional way of thinking about an organization and may feel uncomfortable for some. It was not an easy decision for me especially, but it is the right one at the right time. If executed correctly, the business, and therefore clients, will benefit. For all of us, this will come down to trusting and believing in this decision, then committing to execution. It's that simple.

As for me, I've always wanted to lead with honesty and openness and want you to know that I am very comfortable with this. I am proud of what we have built and grateful to have been a part of this amazing story that will continue through you! I have said this before, I love to build and for this last chapter, I have been able to build a part of history. I am so lucky for the opportunity given to me by Lidong almost six years ago to the day. He trusted me and I have learned a lot from him and Shou over the years on how to push myself out of my comfort zone and to continue to push my boundaries. I won't be going anywhere soon, you will see me around and over time, that too shall fade but I will leave you with this.

You are building history. Books will be written about this company, stories of how clients are better for our efforts and creators and SMBs alike have had their lives changed. Remember, there is only one TikTok, enjoy the ride. Thank you for trusting me to lead this team, I am eternally grateful and humbled.

Blake

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• A trifecta of economics, pandemic-era realities, and political pressure is changing tech culture.
• From Big Tech to Silicon Valley startups, companies are pushing to "do more with less."
• Leaders aren't shy about wielding their power and aligning around a hard-driving strategy.

For years, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke enjoyed a reputation for growing the $125 billion e-commerce company without working the grueling hours expected of startup founders.

"My job is incredible, but it's also just a job. Family and personal health rank higher in my priority list," he wrote in a now-deleted post on X, then Twitter, shortly before the pandemic, as reported by Business Insider at the time. "The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so."

This year, even Lütke appeared to change his tune.

"I'm at home for dinner but I work at least 10 or so hours a day and a lot of the weekend," Lütke wrote on X. He was responding to a user who called him a "counter-example" to a meme suggesting you can't have work-life balance and a breakthrough startup. "I don't want people to get misguided by this meme."

Across tech, the tables have turned for employees as performance pressure and proclamations of "efficiency" and "intensity" replace perks and pampering. Sweeping layoffs have become the norm in an industry that, in recent memory, enjoyed job security. The pressure to dominate in AI has created intense competition, as companies use the technology to do more with fewer workers. Already hard-driving workplaces have become even harder.

While the situation for tech employees has been changing since the pandemic boom ended in 2022, more recent developments include a decidedly different tone from executives. Now, companies aren't just making these changes; they want to be seen making them.

Meta earlier this year said it was cutting 4,000 employees deemed low performers as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the "culturally neutered" corporate world had gotten away from "masculine energy." Amazon insisted that employees return to the workplace every weekday, a policy some employees say is stricter than before the pandemic.

Other companies have cracked down, too. Microsoft, which was once referred to as a "country club" for its relatively lax culture, cut 2,000 employees as it overhauled its review process to eliminate underperformers more quickly.

Google, which practically invented tech perks like free lunch, started an "efficiency drive." Its cofounder Sergey Brin, who had stepped away from leading Google but now often shows up to work on the company's Gemini AI models, recently recommended that employees working on its Gemini tools should work 60 hours a week and go into the office "at least every weekday." Wall Street has rewarded this rigor, as stock prices of Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google's parent, Alphabet, have surged since 2022.

Startups also see a trickle-down effect from Big Tech companies' pressures. Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures, said he had noticed a "pronounced shift" toward leaner teams and rigorous performance standards at startups.

Between performance-based cuts, return-to-office mandates, and the stripping of workplace perks, it's clear not only that the tech industry is done coddling employees, but that companies want to send the message those days are over. BI interviewed employees from tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, as well as various tech startups, about the changes. Some spoke on the condition of anonymity since they're not authorized to talk to the press, though their identities are known to BI.

Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon did not comment. Shopify did not respond to a request for comment.

From comfy to collapsed

For years, fierce competition for tech workers meant companies spoiled employees with astonishing salaries and swanky perks, such as in-office massages and free food cooked by fancy chefs.

By 2022, tech companies seemingly couldn't throw enough money at workers. Early that year, Amazon more than doubled its maximum base salary, and Microsoft gave across-the-board raises to employees up to a certain level of seniority to dissuade them from leaving for competitors.

As the pandemic boom ended, tech stocks plummeted, and interest rates increased through 2022. This prompted an efficiency drive by many companies as investors demanded profitability over growth at all costs.

Also that year, companies watched the billionaire Elon Musk's handling of the Twitter acquisition, in which he cut thousands of employees, plus perks like free lunches, and demanded a commitment to a new "extremely hardcore" vision and "long hours at a high intensity." At one point, Twitter workers were begging on Slack for toilet paper and clean bathrooms amid Musk's drastic cost-cutting.

As of late last year, Fidelity valued X at only about 20% of the $44 billion that Musk bought it for in 2022. Still, his approach may have expanded what the tech industry thought possible in terms of workforce and cost cutting.

"People paid attention because the prevailing wisdom was you couldn't take out that much of an engineering organization and put that much instability on it and not have it fall over," Brad Porter, the founder and CEO of Cobot, told BI. "It did come close to falling. He pushed right to the edge of it actually falling over, but it didn't fall over."

'Do more with less'

By the end of 2022 and in early 2023, tech giants had conducted unprecedented rounds of layoffs. Meta, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft collectively laid off more than 60,000 employees during that time.

Layoffs have remained at a steady drip across the industry since. Such cuts have become so frequent at Google, for example, that employees have taken to crowdsourcing information on layoffs in an internal Google Doc.

Employees told BI about the pressure across the industry to "do more with less." "There's lots of uncertainty," one longtime Amazon employee said, "and lots of pressure to perform the jobs of multiple people at the mercy of ruthless middle management."

Tech companies are also culling middle management layers. Amazon in September announced a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of this month. In December, CEO Sundar Pichai told his staff that Google had cut vice president and manager roles by 10% as part of its efficiency drive. Microsoft also monitors what it calls "span of control," tracking the number of reports per manager.

Performance pressures

Amid the cuts, employees across the industry say companies are dialing up the performance demands.

Meta told its staff in January that it would eliminate roughly 5% of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, to "raise the bar on performance management," as Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo.

Google also increased pressure on employees. Perhaps most telling was Pichai's December comments attempting to clarify what "Googleyness" means for a modern Google. Once a squishy and vague philosophy for the search giant's corporate culture, Pichai said he believed it now meant, among other things, being "mission first."

"There is more pressure for individuals to be better in their roles, and there is much more aggressive performance management happening these days," a longtime Google manager said.

"We're being asked to do more for less," said another current longtime Google employee.

That same Google employee said that Silicon Valley had been moving toward more ruthless, efficient workplaces for a while — and that the current political climate "gives them the green light to do it openly." Google has been working to become more efficient since its chief investment officer Ruth Porat joined the company as CFO from Morgan Stanley in 2015, "but now the masks are off," the person said.

Microsoft was once referred to as the tech industry's "country club," meaning a place employees would go after they were done working hard in their careers and wanted to coast before retirement. A change this year shows how far Microsoft has shifted when it fired 2,000 employees deemed low performers without severance and ended their health benefits the same day. This kind of performance-based mass cut showed a shift for the tech giant.

One longtime Microsoft senior-level employee said they felt that the "culture shifts toward firmer performance expectations" at peer tech companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon made it more acceptable for Microsoft to do the same.

At TikTok, the pressure to perform jumped last year after the company directed managers to deliver more low scores in performance reviews, leading to PIPs and eventual exits. At the same time, six current and former employees told BI their goals had become much harder to hit. One staffer called the goals "unattainable."

The company has also recently heightened RTO requirements for some teams. In February, it told its US e-commerce workers that in addition to being in the office five days a week, they would physically need to be in the building for eight hours a day. Ten current and former workers told BI that burnout had become common, leading to some going on mental health leave to get a break. TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.

"You feel like if you're not hitting a target, even if it's a moving target, you're in trouble," a former staffer who went on leave for mental health reasons told BI. "For me, it was just feeling like a failure, like I couldn't do anything right."

It's gotten hardcore in the 'valley of death'

The increasing pivot to performance has even made it to already hard-charging startups.

Startups have a time-honored tradition of an always-on, work-first lifestyle. Early employees are expected to put in grueling hours of coding and customer support during this critical phase, known as the "valley of death," when startups are flush with initial funding but not yet profitable.

The free-money era tested this tradition of hustle and thriftiness. Investors heaped money into small startups when interest rates bottomed out, and the blitz scaling that followed set off an arms race of perks to help startups attract top talent. Employees could work from home and set their own schedules. They pocketed wellness stipends and trotted the globe on extravagant off-sites. The tech startup Bolt gave many employees Fridays off.

"I think many individuals — founders included — lost sight of the true goal of a company. It is to make money," Mang-Git Ng, the founder of Anvil, a paperwork automation company, told BI.

Now, the executives who had lavished high salaries and fancy perks on their employees are resetting expectations, winding down remote work, and cutting head count.

"Everyone who comes into our office at Decagon has opted into working with a team that's here because we want to do big things and see bigger and better results," said Jesse Zhang, the founder of Decagon, who now badges into the office six days a week. "There's no such thing as a rocketship that doesn't have a certain level of intensity to fuel its trajectory."

Call it the Big Tech trickle-down effect.

"Founders aren't sugarcoating it," said Natan Fisher, who runs a recruiting firm, SingleSprout, that specializes in hiring technical talent. "I've had a few cofounders tell employees they aren't working hard enough, and, 'If you're not all in, no hard feelings, we can give severance, but we can't slow down.' Late nights, weekends, even people crashing at the office, it's real."

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Emma Cosgrove, Eugene Kim, and Pranav Dixit contributed to this report.

• ByteDance uses eight category ratings to evaluate TikTok employees in performance reviews.
• If an employee receives a low rating, they can be put on a performance improvement plan.
• The company last year told managers it wanted to dole out more low scores in reviews.

It's performance review season at TikTok, and some staffers are getting hit with PIP-or-severance offers.

Business Insider viewed a rubric for how the company scores employees in reviews, which happen twice a year. Scroll to see the criteria.

The company grades employees using eight category ratings, ranging from "outstanding" to "failed." Four current and recent former TikTok employees in the Asia and US offices verified the scoring structure, though one US staffer said the wording, such as adjectives or word order, varied slightly from a different format they'd seen around the ratings. The meaning was the same, they said.

The rubric measures employees on three main criteria: Output, Leadership Principles, and ByteStyles — a set of workplace values it uses to define company culture. Those cultural principles include being candid and clear, courageous, and treating every day like it's "day 1."

Below is a rating scale available to employees in Asia at TikTok and ByteDance. The global employees BI spoke with said these ratings are combined into an overall performance score for each staffer. The staffers asked to remain anonymous to protect their jobs and career prospects; their identities are known to BI.

TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.

For ByteStyle and leadership principles, employees are only scored between "I" for "improvement needed" and "E" for "exceed expectations."

How low scores impact employees

Performance reviews have been a stress point at the company, particularly after managers were told last year to give out more low reviews to better differentiate performance. A score of "M-" for "meet expectations," or "I", which is defined as "improvement needed," may lead to a performance-improvement plan or a severance offer. PIPs are common in the corporate world. Companies may offer them as a path to recover from a bad review, though many people say it's hard to survive them.

Four current TikTok staffers told BI that they felt that PIPs were essentially impossible to accomplish at the company.

"I have never met somebody who's passed a PIP," one of the staffers said.

One former staffer said the rating scale can be misleading. For example, an M-, which is listed in the rubric as "meet expectations," is internally considered a poor grade.

Current and former TikTok employees previously told BI that the pressure to meet performance goals has increased in the US in the past year, amid reorgs and other changes at the company. Several of those staff said their goals had shifted, making it difficult to meet expectations. The combination of internal pressure along with outside political threats due to a divest-or-ban law have contributed to burnout and mental health leave requests among some staff, BI earlier reported.

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• It's performance review season at TikTok, and some staff with low scores have been given a choice.
• They can either go on a performance-improvement plan or leave with severance, employees told BI.
• The company last year asked managers to deliver more low scores during review cycles.

It's review season for US staff at TikTok and its parent company ByteDance, and some employees are getting a choice: PIP or go.

TikTok is offering some employees who received low performance scores the choice of submitting to a performance improvement plan (PIP) or agreeing to leave the company with some severance, according to two e-commerce employees who received the offers verbally and three other current staffers who had heard directly from colleagues about the arrangement. TikTok instructed managers last year to deliver more low scores in reviews.

The employees said the value of the offers, which have also been made in earlier cycles, varied. One offer included one month in which the staffer would stay on payroll without having to work — often referred to as "garden leave" — along with a separate one-month severance payout arranged as part of a mutual separation agreement. The staffers who spoke to Business Insider asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation; their identities are known to BI.

Business Insider was unable to determine how many employees had been given an offer like this as part of this review cycle. A TikTok spokesperson confirmed the company was implementing PIPs but said they did not have information on severance offers. In February, The Information reported that TikTok's CEO Shou Chew had said he wanted to review the company's workforce and remove unnecessary layers.

TikTok and ByteDance are not the only tech companies to offer voluntary exit agreements to staff with low scores. In 2024, Meta began delivering lower ratings to staff as part of a workplace efficiency effort, offering some of those staff a chance to take three months' severance instead of going on a PIP. Other tech companies similarly offer PIPs, which can be tough to recover from no matter where you work. And a push to identify "low performers" has become trendy across the workforce.

Three current TikTok staffers told BI that they felt that accepting a PIP instead of severance was rare at the company because it was very challenging to survive a PIP.

"I have never met somebody who's passed a PIP," one of the staffers said.

The departure agreements arrive at a challenging moment for TikTok. The company's political future in the US is up in the air due to a divest-or-ban law that asked TikTok to find a new owner. In January, President Donald Trump instructed his attorney general not to enforce the law for 75 days, giving TikTok and ByteDance some more time to find a political resolution.

Current and former employees at TikTok told BI that burnout has become common at the company amid political uncertainty and the pressure to perform. Performance evaluations, in particular, have become a point of anxiety.

While TikTok reviews employees twice a year, it sometimes feels like "it's always performance review season," one of the current staffers said. "They'll PIP people, and then they'll hire new people, and then they'll continue this meat grinder of performance reviews."

• Creator economy startup Jellysmack has spun off part of its original content business into a new entity.
• Blue Foxes, led by former Jellysmack VPs, will operate some of its social brands.
• SoftBank-banked Jellysmack has gone through layoffs and strategy shifts in recent months.

SoftBank-backed Jellysmack, one of the giants of the creator economy startup landscape, has unloaded another of its units.

The startup has spun off its "Jellysmack Originals" business, the company confirmed to Business Insider.

The new entity is called Blue Foxes, and is led by former Jellysmack Originals VPs Maxime Horbez and Paula Layoun. The company has taken over some of Jellysmack's owned-and-operated social brands, including YouTube channels, Snapchat accounts, and Facebook pages like Beauty Studio, Oh My Goal, Gamology, and House of Bounce, among others.

"We can confirm the launch of Blue Foxes as a spin-off, and we're very happy that the original content team will continue leading this business," Jellysmack's cofounder Michael Philippe told BI.

Jellysmack will continue operating the Law&Crime Network, which it acquired in 2023, and Philippe said the company would focus on US-based IP and YouTube.

Jellysmack raised a nine-figure investment from SoftBank in 2021 and is one of the most prominent startups in the creator industry.

However, Jellysmack — which once had over 1,000 staffers — has undergone significant changes in the past two years, including multiple rounds of layoffs. In March 2024, the company sold off its catalog-licensing business as it prioritized more profitable core initiatives, BI previously reported.

Jellysmack's troubles are part of a larger story. While the broader creator economy startup ecosystem was red hot in terms of venture capital interest and valuations from 2020 to 2023, the space has simmered down. Some startups have consolidated, while others have shed staff or shut down operations.

New name, same game

Blue Foxes is keeping several Jellysmack staffers on the team, per posts from former Jellysmack employees on LinkedIn. Blue Foxes' top executives wrote in separate posts that they hosted a launch party for the new brand in Paris on February 27th.

While Blue Foxes is a separate entity from Jellysmack with a new name and logo, "everything else stays the same," Horbez wrote in a LinkedIn post. "I am very proud to take on the leadership of Blue Foxes alongside Paula. And I'm even more thrilled to embark on this adventure with an incredible team, composed of talent spread across the globe, many of whom have been with us for years."

Horbez did not provide additional comments on the business when reached for comment. Layoun did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• TikTok employees say they're experiencing burnout amid reorgs, tough performance goals, and other workplace pressures.
• Current and former TikTok employees told BI it's become common for staffers to go on leave for mental health reasons.
• Some employees said uncertainty around TikTok's US future is also causing stress and demotivation.

In mid-January, ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on TikTok's future in the US, employees at the company were focused on another task: filling out their performance reviews.

These evaluations had become particularly anxiety-inducing for some of the company's 7,000-plus US staffers after it instructed managers last year to grade workers more harshly. A low score on a review could lead to a smaller bonus or a performance-improvement plan, or PIP.

Uncertainty about the company's path forward, combined with fear that they would personally receive negative reviews, made some staffers feel directionless and burned out.

"I see people change from motivated to 'I don't care anymore,'" one current TikTok employee told Business Insider.

TikTok has been placing high demands on its employees as political scrutiny on the company heats up over its owner's ties to China, 10 current and former employees who have worked at the company in the past year told Business Insider. These US staffers spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their jobs and career prospects; their identities are known to BI.

Some of the workplace pressure is particular to TikTok, but it also reflects a broader trend in the tech industry. Companies like Meta, Google, and Microsoft have targeted low performers, cut workplace perks, and cracked down on employee dissent in the pursuit of business efficiency.

The trade-off for workplace pressure is high pay and working at the buzziest companies in tech.

"From a career growth standpoint, you have access to huge budgets and big names," a former staffer said of working at TikTok. "Everyone in the industry wants to talk to you."

Still, burnout can take a real human toll, as well as impact a company's operations and bottom line.

Burned out staffers turn to mental health leave

The TikTok staffers who spoke with BI said they felt that burnout — which is defined by the World Health Organization as workplace stress that has not been successfully managed — had become common.

Some employees are addressing burnout by requesting time off for mental health leave, five of the current and former employees said. These staffers worked on three different teams across several offices and spoke directly to colleagues who had taken mental health leave or had done so themselves.

Business Insider was unable to obtain data on how many TikTok employees have used mental health leave, and the company did not respond to requests for comment. But interviews with current and former staffers made clear that mental health — and taking time off for it — has been a topic of discussion among the workforce over the past year.

"We all talked," another former TikTok employee said. "We all side texted. And we all found out pretty quickly whether people were on leave because of burnout."

The former staffer said there was a period when around 20% of their team was out on mental health leave. While TikTok doesn't broadcast why a worker goes on leave, the staffer was told directly by colleagues that they were taking time off for their mental health. A second current staffer said they had direct knowledge of six employees who had requested mental health leave.

The length of leave depended on the individual and the state where they live, but several of the TikTok insiders said two to three months of paid time off was typical. When a staffer goes on leave, their away status and period of time off are typically displayed in internal communication tools to alert colleagues that they are unreachable, without specifying the reason, three current and former employees told BI.

Some employees chose to go on leave because they were exhausted and needed a break after feeling intense pressure to hit their goals, said three of the TikTok insiders, who had either spoken to team members who took time off or gone on leave themselves.

The first former staffer described a moment last year when their team reorganized under new leadership and saw expectations around performance spike.

"It didn't make sense to me," they said. "If you have ambitious goals, you need more head count, tooling, and software."

As performance targets increased, stress followed, a third former staffer said.

"For me, it was just feeling like a failure, like I couldn't do anything right," said the ex-employee, who went on mental health leave while at the company. BI viewed a confirmation email sent to the employee to verify they had been approved for the leave.

Tech's burnout problem

TikTok isn't the only tech company dealing with burnout, which has become increasingly common across the sector. Mental health leave is also on the rise in the US workforce. In a 2024 survey of US business executives and HR professionals conducted by the law firm Littler Mendelson, 74% of respondents saw an increase in "employee requests for leaves of absence or accommodations for mental health-related issues over the last year."

But TikTok faces unique challenges when compared to other US workplaces. For one, its app could shut down in the US in April if it fails to reach a political resolution with the Trump administration. While TikTok has assured US staffers that they would still have jobs even if its app were kicked out of the country, the company rarely addresses its political challenges internally. That's added to overall anxiety, six of the current and former employees told BI.

"The uncertainty is certainly playing a major role in burnout in the sense that we don't know if we're going to have jobs," the second current employee said.

That said, for some staff, dealing with challenging performance standards and the threat of having the business shut down by the US government is worth it for the opportunity to work at a fast-growing company that is reshaping the tech industry. And not everyone at TikTok faces the same pressure to perform, seven of the current and former staffers said.

"I think depending on the team, there has been a more tense environment, but at the same time, I also know plenty of teams where that is not the case," the first current employee said.

TikTok provides various mental health resources to staff, including therapy sessions, via a platform called Lyra Health.

'Building the plane while flying it'

TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, are known for testing many ideas and then pivoting based on what works or flops. Leaders at TikTok sometimes talk about this approach as "building the plane while flying it," a current employee and two former staffers told BI.

As part of that startup ethos, the company regularly reorganizes or lays off teams, changes employees' performance goals, and adds new policies like mandatory return-to-office for some teams.

Some employees said that frequent changes to how they worked, whether it was abruptly getting a new manager or seeing their goals change, made their jobs feel insecure.

"The joke internally was don't get too comfortable because something was going to change," the second former staffer said.

As part of the reorgs, some new team leaders either worked out of China (where ByteDance is headquartered) and required late calls from US teams, or migrated from abroad to work in US offices, seven of the current and former staffers told BI. Managers like Bob Kang and Qing Lan worked on the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, before taking on e-commerce and SMB advertising leadership roles at TikTok, for example.

Several of the new executives raised the performance targets for their teams or implemented new policies that increased time at work, such as return-to-office requirements, the seven TikTok insiders said. The TikTok Shop team, under Kang's leadership, recently intensified a return-to-office rule that required employees to be in the office five days a week, specifying that they would need to be physically in the office space for eight hours a day, for instance.

"They have been consolidating under Chinese leadership to some extent," the first current staffer said, referring to Chinese staff coming to the US.

In a December court filing, TikTok said that its US platform is controlled by US employees, subsidiaries, and contractors, but that its recommendation algorithm is developed by a global team.

Other former employees, such as Chloe Shih and Pabel Martinez, have previously raised concerns about the intensity of the company's work culture.

The focus on working long hours isn't new to the China tech scene. Tech firms like ByteDance built massive businesses in the country as part of a "996" work culture that asked employees to work 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week (a practice that is now illegal in China). Even as ByteDance has pledged to work a "1075" schedule — 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., five days a week — there remains a sense among some US employees that their Chinese colleagues are constantly working.

"There were a lot of leaders that came in from ByteDance or the China-based teams, and they operated so differently," a fourth former employee said. "There was a cultural perspective that the US and outside of China just doesn't work as fast as China."

The pressure to always be available can have an impact on burnout.

"People are not machines, and giving them breaks to recharge, to think differently, helps our employees be more creative," Jaclyn Margolis, an associate professor who researches organizational behavior at Pepperdine University's Graziadio Business School, told BI.

Failure to address burnout can lead to absenteeism and turnover, said Laura Giurge, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

The economic impact of burnout in the workplace can be sizable. A 2025 study from the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimated that employee disengagement and burnout cost US companies between $3,999 and $20,683 a year per disengaged staffer, depending on the level of seniority.

TikTok's 'golden handcuffs' and a tough job market

While working at TikTok can be grueling for some US employees, the company also pays its staff competitively — a key perk. A BI analysis of work-visa disclosures from late 2024 found that with a few exceptions, most of the company's base salary offers were in the six figures in the US.

Fear of losing a high salary acts as a form of "golden handcuffs" for TikTok employees, the third former staffer said.

There is also no guarantee that leaving TikTok for a competitor would reduce workplace stress, as other Big Tech firms have also increased pressure on staff as part of an ongoing efficiency push in the industry.

Even if an employee wants to jump ship, it may be tough to land a new gig, as the tech job market is very tight. As of February, US software development job postings were around 36.5% below their pre-pandemic levels, according to data compiled by the jobs site Indeed.

Allison Shrivastava, an economist with the Indeed Hiring Lab, said there's uncertainty in the job market and quit rates are very low.

"The tech scene elsewhere has been really rough," a third current employee said. "Feeling kind of stuck."

And for the thousands of employees working in TikTok's US offices, the issue of job security is particularly heightened as we approach April 5, the deadline for TikTok to make a deal that appeases Washington. A divest-or-ban law, which the Supreme Court upheld as constitutional, has targeted ByteDance's ties to China. Without additional government intervention, TikTok could disappear from app stores and potentially cease operating in less than a month.

"Sometimes people wonder why we are doing this job, because in a few weeks, it may no longer be relevant," the first current staffer said.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at dwhateley@businessinsider.com or Signal at @danwhateley.94. Use a personal email address and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

Ashley Rodriguez contributed reporting.

• TikTok Shop, the e-commerce arm of TikTok, launched in Mexico in February.
• It offers sellers a bridge into Latin America, a fast-growing region for online shopping.
• Its arrival in the country offers a way for US Shop sellers to hedge against a possible TikTok ban.

TikTok's future may be up in the air in the US, but it's ramping up in other parts of the world.

The company officially launched its e-commerce product, Shop, in Mexico in February after testing it in the country. The platform is still getting off the ground there, but it's attracting local sellers like beauty brands Sarelly, Renova, Pink Up Cosmetics, and Sinless Beauty.

The move across the border is also opening an opportunity for US brands to expand into a fast-growing market — and hedge against a possible TikTok ban.

Beauty brand KimChi Chic Beauty, supplement brand Beast Bites, and security-camera brand Wyze are among the US companies planning to expand into Mexico, per two Shop agencies that work with the firms.

"It's a logical play for any seller that saw success or could see success on TikTok Shop," said William August, CEO of the social-commerce agency Outlandish, which runs a livestream facility in Los Angeles and recently set up operations in Mexico. "Regardless of what happens in the US, they should be doing it anyway."

TikTok Shop has grown quickly in the US since it first began testing the feature there in 2022. But the app is operating on shaky ground due to a divestment law that requires its Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or essentially stop operating in the US. While that hasn't deterred many brands that sell goods on TikTok in the US, some are busy diversifying onto other platforms like live-selling app Whatnot or entertainment platforms like Flip and LTK. Moving into other TikTok Shop markets, like the UK, Singapore, and now Mexico, is another tactic.

How a US brand can expand into Mexico

In some instances, Outlandish is helping US merchants launch in other countries by registering a local business on their behalf, called a merchant of record.

The company also acts as a one-stop shop for other services, like logistics and compliance.

Outlandish set up a joint venture with marketing and retail media firm MindgruveMacarta to help bring US and global brands onto TikTok Shop. In February, Outlandish sent its US livestream training managers to Mexico to teach local staff about selling live, August said. It plans to open a video production hub in the country with the capacity to produce thousands of shopping videos.

"So long as you have a good product, when you enter a new market with TikTok Shop, you can grow a brand there," August said.

Social-commerce agency Orca is also working with third-party logistics providers in Mexico to help US brands start selling in the country, offering services like inventory management and compliance, said its CEO Max Benator. "If you're a brand in the US, you can't just turn on in Mexico," he said.

Shop's entry into a neighboring country allows US sellers to do more than lower their risk from a US ban. It gives them access to an e-commerce market that's on the rise. In September, EMARKETER forecast that e-commerce spending in Latin America would reach close to $180 billion in 2024.

Mexico, in particular, is expected to drive a lot of that growth. In 2024, EMARKETER forecast Mexico would be the fifth-fastest growing e-commerce market in the world, growing online sales by 15.7%.Major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Mercado Libre are investing billions of dollars to improve their operations in Mexico and reach a nascent customer base there, according to the firm.

"Mexico and Latin America are some of the fastest growing e-commerce markets in the world," Benator said.

• LTK is relaunching its app on Thursday to add new social features and expand beyond shopping.
• Other social-commerce apps like Flip have similarly moved into general entertainment.
• The companies are stepping up efforts to blend entertainment and shopping as they chase users.

For social-shopping apps, commerce alone isn't cutting it.

LTK, a platform that lets users buy products from creator videos and posts, is relaunching its app on Thursday to encourage more everyday content from its users.

"We're moving from being a shopping app to really being a lifestyle app," Amber Venz Box, cofounder of LTK, told Business Insider.

LTK's new feed lets users discover videos by geography and topic, such as fashion, parenting, cooking, and travel. It still wants creators to tag items in videos (that's how the company and its affiliate partners make money), but it hopes they'll vlog about other parts of their lives without any intent to push products.

The app also plans to roll out more strictly social features, like the ability to connect with friends.

It's not the only commerce platform looking to broaden its appeal in recent months. Flip, a TikTok-like app once composed purely of videos tagged with products, opened up to other content in July. It now hosts everyday videos it calls clips, which run the gamut from movie scenes to creator-on-the-street interviews and other types of content that would live on a general entertainment platform.

"The idea of social commerce over the last five years was that everyone built it to be a commerce platform where there's somebody selling you the product," Flip's CEO Noor Agha told BI.

Agha said Flip's clips feature is part of a push to merge entertainment and commerce. "If we cannot solve both, social commerce will never actually go mainstream," Agha said.

The opportunity is huge for companies in the category that can build an audience, as platforms like TikTok have shown. In a December EMARKETER forecast, the research firm predicted the number of US social-commerce buyers would hit 100 million in 2024, with sales crossing $100 billion in 2026. Social-shopping startups like Whatnot and ShopMy have pulled in tens of millions of dollars in new funding in the past few months as they chase new users.

TikTok made entertainment a must-have in social shopping

The push among shopping apps to add general entertainment is likely a response to the rise of TikTok's e-commerce platform, Shop. The app built an audience of more than a billion users globally through social entertainment before introducing commerce features.

"A lot of the social-shopping apps are trying to reverse engineer that entertainment component into their apps to make them more sticky and to keep users and audiences coming back," said Sky Canaves, a principal analyst at EMARKETER covering retail and e-commerce.

Social platforms in the US have spent years testing features to get users to buy stuff in-app, with mixed results. TikTok finally showed that consumers, if prodded enough, would get on board.

Canaves said TikTok has shown that social commerce can work, "but it needs to be grounded in content, and typically that's entertainment content and creator content."

Ultimately, that reverse engineering feat may be tough to pull off. In February, Amazon nixed its TikTok-like shopping feed, Inspire, in another sign that shopping-only video feeds lack staying power.

But relying on platforms like TikTok or Instagram for distribution is also risky for startups that don't want to be subject to the whims of Big Tech. Instagram, for example, has pulled back on commerce features in recent years.

LTK recently partnered with TikTok to integrate affiliate links within the TikTok app. But TikTok generally keeps its e-commerce features in-house. The company's future in the US is also uncertain due to a divest-or-ban law that targets the company and its owner ByteDance.

For social-shopping startups, building an entertainment platform where they can control everything may be the best path forward.

Putting social in social commerce

Making shopping feel more social is key to retaining users and growing an app's audience. Venz Box said a big part of that is tapping into the relationships users have with brands and the creators themselves.

LTK is encouraging creators to post more lifestyle content to the app so that users feel as connected to the creator on LTK as they do on larger platforms like TikTok or Instagram.

"We started investing in order to be the place that they retain, nurture, and grow their community," Venz Box said.

Community is a buzzword for social apps overall and has driven several trends in social shopping. Substack has several shopping-focused newsletters with established online and IRL communities. Meanwhile, TYB, a shopping-rewards platform cofounded by apparel brand Outdoor Voices' Ty Haney, is focused on building and maintaining communities of superfans with challenges and group chats.

Ultimately, every app is fighting for a share of the internet's most valuable commodity: consumers' time.

"I am willing to sacrifice that not every piece of content has something to buy in it because the opportunity set is so much larger if you can go deeper with people," Venz Box said.

• TikTok plans to begin tracking how long its US e-commerce staffers are in the office.
• The company is requiring eight hours a day, five days a week, two TikTok employees said.
• Return-to-office mandates have become a hot-button issue across the tech industry.

TikTok is tightening the reins on office attendance, and it's caught some employees off guard.

The company plans to track how long its US e-commerce employees are in the office, requiring eight hours a day, five days a week, two staffers told Business Insider.

It's also asking its e-commerce organization, which runs TikTok Shop, to be at work between 4 and 7 p.m. PT, according to the employees.

The internal messaging around the change seemed to have been tailored to TikTok and ByteDance workers in the company's Seattle office, where much of the e-commerce organization sits. But the message was shared with e-commerce employees across the US, meaning East Coast employees could end up working as late as 10 p.m. to comply, the staffers said.

TikTok's owner, ByteDance, is based in China. Employees previously told BI that the company required some US employees to join calls at late hours to accommodate different time zones.

The two staffers said they expected to be tracked each time they used their badge to enter or leave office buildings to keep tabs on their hours. The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the policy change. Their identities are known to BI.

TikTok declined to comment on the policy.

This return-to-office, or RTO, move specifically affects employees who work on e-commerce, not others within the company.

TikTok Shop is a priority at the company, which has sought to gain market share in an e-commerce ecosystem dominated by players like Amazon and Shopify. It's grown quickly since launching in the US in November 2023, last year pulling in $100 million in US sales on Black Friday alone. By some measures, such as repeat purchases, it beat retailers like Walmart. But the company has a long road ahead. It could be using RTO mandates to try to drive up performance, as other tech companies have.

While TikTok's e-commerce team was previously required to be in the office five days a week, the increased scrutiny around time on-site caught the staffers off guard. One of the employees said people were surprised by the sudden rollout of the rule. The person said morale was low after the announcement. Both employees wondered whether the Seattle office looked too empty when company leadership visited last week.

The RTO requirements arrive at a prickly moment for TikTok. The company is reckoning with a divest-or-ban law that caused it to briefly shut down in the US in January. While President Donald Trump has delayed enforcement of the law via executive order, the company has until early April to find a new owner for its US assets.

Return to office has become a contentious topic across the tech industry and the broader US workforce. Many companies shifted to remote or hybrid work early in the pandemic, and workers got used to the flexibility. But some executives have come to view working from home as a productivity drain and want their employees back.

While Meta and Google employees are asked to come into the office three days a week, other firms like JPMorgan and Dell are calling staffers back five days a week. The creator platform Cameo recently dangled a $10,000 raise for staffers who returned to its Chicago office full time.

Are you a TikTok or ByteDance employee with insight to share? Contact Dan Whateley at dwhateley@businessinsider.com or reach out over Signal at @danwhateley.94.

• TikTok's top music executive, Ole Obermann, is leaving the company next month.
• Obermann helped transform TikTok into a force in the music industry.
• The exec's departure comes at a challenging moment for TikTok as it faces a US ban.

Ole Obermann, the top music executive at TikTok, is leaving the company in March, a person familiar with the departure told Business Insider.

Since joining the company in 2019, Obermann has helped TikTok expand from its roots as a lip-syncing app into a music industry power player.

Obermann is the global head of music business development at TikTok and its owner, ByteDance. He oversees the company's long-term strategy for music, including rights negotiations. Obermann's team works on relationships with labels and independent artists, hosting live sessions with creators and working on licensing contracts. The news of Obermann's departure was first reported by Music Business Worldwide.

Over the past few years, as TikTok has grown into a social media titan, the company has also left its mark on the music business, transforming music marketing and helping a wave of new artists get discovered.

During Obermann's tenure, the company launched a variety of products and programs around music, including a dedicated music streaming app, an artist distribution platform called SoundOn, a SiriusXM channel, and a live music concert, TikTok in the Mix.

Last year, Obermann also guided TikTok through a contract dispute with the major label Universal Music Group.

The music exec previously served as the chief digital officer at Warner Music Group, where he helped the company close its first deal with Facebook. Before that, Obermann was the executive vice president of global digital partner development at Sony Music, where he worked on the company's first deal with Spotify and helped the team improve its digital analytics strategy.

His departure comes at a tenuous moment for TikTok. The company has until April 5 to find a new owner for its US assets to comply with a law that requires its parent company, ByteDance, to divest or effectively cease operating in the country.

Obermann did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Meta's policy chief said the company would loop in Trump when it feels targeted by regulators abroad.
• The company believes Trump would defend US companies he views as being treated unfairly.
• Meta has previously faced billions of dollars in fines from European Union regulators.

The European Union has been a huge pain for Meta over the years as it's faced billions of dollars in fines from its regulators.

The Facebook owner may now have a new weapon in its artillery to defend itself from future enforcement abroad: President Donald Trump.

Meta's chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan told a panel of European policymakers that the company would not shy away from letting Trump know when it felt that it had been discriminated against by the EU. He suggested Trump may step in to help out.

"President Trump has made clear since he's taken office that he is going to defend US companies and US business abroad, and particularly if he feels that US companies have been treated unfairly," Kaplan said, speaking on Sunday at the Munich Security Conference.

"What he decides to do about it is clearly up to him, but I don't think we're going to shy away from saying when we think that the enforcement of these laws is being directed at us in a way that goes beyond what the parliament passed and what the institutions passed," Kaplan said.

Meta has faced massive fines by EU regulators in recent years. In 2023, the company was hit with a €1.2 billion fine (around $1.3 billion) from Ireland's Data Protection Commission, which said it failed to comply with a data privacy requirement under the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR. Meta said it would appeal the ruling.

In 2024, the European Commission levied a roughly €798 million (almost $840 million) fine against the company, alleging it created unfair trading conditions by connecting Facebook Marketplace to its social platform. Meta said it would appeal the decision, and in February, it announced it would allow rival classified ads providers to post on Marketplace.

Kaplan's comments arrive at a moment of change at Meta, which owns social apps like Facebook and Instagram, as well as the messaging platform Whatsapp. Since Trump was elected, the company tapped Kaplan, who previously served as a Republican strategist, to serve in its top policy role, replacing Nick Clegg.

Meta also adjusted its approach to content moderation in the wake of Trump's victory, announcing plans to replace third-party fact-checkers with user-generated community notes, similar to what's been implemented by Elon Musk-owned X, formerly Twitter. Kaplan addressed that shift in his discussion on Sunday.

"People do have different perspectives about what's misinformation and what's not," he said. "The approach that we're adopting going forward and starting in the US this year is to use the diverse voices that exist on our platform to assess what they're seeing and provide additional information."

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson directed Business Insider to a press release about Kaplan's appearance. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

• VC firm Slow Ventures has raised $60 million to invest in content creators.
• The firm will make $1 million to $3 million bets in exchange for a 10% cut in creator businesses.
• The firm targets creators with niche audiences, superfans, and big ideas about where to innovate.

YouTubers are the new Stanford dropouts.

Slow Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, launched a new $60 million fund focused on investing in content creators. It's looking for creators with the "DNA of a YC founder," Megan Lightcap, a partner leading Slow's creator fund, told Business Insider, referring to Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator.

"Everyone has looked at creators and the businesses that they're building and been like, 'Oh, it's cute. It's like a little lifestyle business,'" Lightcap said.

However, Lightcap poses that some of these businesses are venture scale.

"There's going to be a subset of creators that are very entrepreneurial, have deep trust and expertise in a specific vertical, and are builders," Lightcap said. "They're founders."

Investing in creators' businesses isn't new for Slow. The firm has been testing the model for a few years. Other companies like Jellysmack and Spotter have also offered capital to creators with a focus on licensing their content catalogs. But this is the first time Slow is setting up a dedicated fund for creator deals with participation from institutional investors like MIT and the University of Michigan.

For Slow, investing in a creator does not mean simply getting a cut of their media business built on YouTube ad revenue and brand deals. It's about getting a share in the profits of whatever spin-off businesses they launch, such as a gardening influencer selling rakes or a food creator publishing a cookbook.

The company said it will invest between $1 million and $3 million to get a 10% stake in creator holding companies. Those holding companies will house all the different business lines an influencer might dabble in.

Lightcap said the capital allows for flexibility, letting creators "test and experiment" with content and production, hiring teams, and building broader businesses.

Where Slow's money will flow

What type of creators is Slow looking for? Not a generalist like MrBeast, but rather, a content creator passionate about a specific niche who understands what products are missing from that category.

Slow's target creator sees that opportunity, knows that their audience feels similarly, and says, "'I'm going to build it,'" Lightcap said.

While some creators may be more focused on platform ad revenue or brand deals, Slow is looking for creators whose businesses are outgrowing the traditional influencer career.

"They look at the media not as the end, but as the means to an end, and think of their content and community, really, as this strategic asset on which they can launch other types of companies," she said.

Creators with a substantial YouTube business are top of mind for Slow.

"There's many ways these creators can emerge," Lightcap said. "Most of them end up in some way, shape, or form on YouTube."

Lightcap highlighted Slow's previous investment into YouTube creator Marina Mogilko's business as an example of a successful deal.

Creators as a new type of founder

Investing in a YouTuber could seem risky to a traditional VC. After all, your return leans on the performance and durability of one individual.

But Lightcap said the situation isn't much different than betting on a startup founder, who often carries the future of a company on their back for years.

She said creators can actually be much easier to conduct due diligence on than a startup that's just getting off the ground. A creator's audience, the presence of superfans, and the ways they make money are easy to vet.

"As seed investors, we're so used to looking at an opportunity with zero data," Lightcap said. "When you're looking at creators at this level, there's actually a ton of stuff to diligence."

At the end of the day, there's precedent for media figures growing niche content into big businesses, with lucrative exits.

"You don't have to squint very hard to be like, 'Would a creator holding company ever IPO?'" Lightcap said. She pointed to Martha Stewart and the Oprah Winfrey Network as examples of media players that successfully scaled. "It's not something that we're necessarily underwriting today, but it's going to be very interesting to see how this all changes."

• Uscreen, a startup that helps creators make apps, scored a $150 million investment from PSG Equity.
• The company offers features like memberships to help influencers gain direct access to their fans.
• It's part of a growing crop of startups focused on building community and nurturing fandom.

The creator startup Uscreen raised $150 million as it aims to help influencers gain more control over the nuts and bolts of their businesses.

The company received a growth investment in February from PSG Equity, which took a majority stake as part of the deal.

Uscreen offers a suite of tools to help creators launch their own apps, engage directly with fans, and make money via membership programs, among other services.

The investment comes at a moment of flux in social media. Creators are bracing for a possible TikTok exit in April. They're watching as AI content gobbles up attention on apps like Facebook. Amid the volatility, influencers and other media players are looking for more direct control over how they reach audiences.

"More and more creators are looking to leverage and own their land, rather than rent that land via all those Big Tech companies and social media platforms," Uscreen's cofounder PJ Taei told Business Insider. "That's really where Uscreen comes in, where you own that audience, own your customers, and can continue to remarket to them."

Creators use Uscreen's tech to host content on websites and mobile and connected-TV apps. The company offers features including livestreams, messaging, and membership tools.

Its creator roster includes fitness and yoga influencers, media companies, entrepreneurship coaches, and educators. They can use Uscreen to retain and store audience information such as email lists and payment details.

Uscreen is part of a growing crop of community-focused startups, including Patreon, Substack, and Fourthwall, that are focused on helping creators connect with their fans directly.

Unlike some of its competitors, Uscreen has leaned more into content infrastructure, allowing creators to build apps for a wide range of devices, including Roku, Apple TV, and Fire TV devices. The move to support TV apps could become more important as social media users increasingly watch content on televisions.

Uscreen makes money by charging creators fees monthly or annually to use its platform. It also takes a cut of subscription revenue from its creator and media partners.

The company says that since its founding in 2015 it has helped creators pull in over $600 million in subscription revenue.

Where Uscreen is headed next

PSG, which this week announced it raised $8 billion across two funds, invests in growth-stage software and tech firms that are small but can scale, Peter Wilde, its cofounder and chairman, said in a statement.

Reid McCann, a principal at PSG, told BI that the firm invested in Uscreen because it felt the moment was ripe for a company focused on "hyper-personalized, community-oriented, identity-oriented creators." He said users want to be with "like-minded people in the community, lifting each other up," and are willing to pay for direct access to creators through features like messaging and livestreams.

McCann said Uscreen's growth opportunities could include international expansion and adding AI capabilities for video creation.

Uscreen plans to use its new funding to invest in product and engineering resources, including adding products to drive fan engagement. It's already testing features like streaks and badges.

"As a bootstrapped business, we're very small, nimble," Taei said. "We do our best to be resourceful, but with a partner such as PSG, we can really put the pedal to the metal."

MrBeast does not want you to mistake him for traditional media.

"I do not want to be Hollywood," YouTube's top star wrote in an employee guidebook for his team, adding, "Get rid of Netflix and Hulu and watch tons of YouTube."

The 26-year-old influencer, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, attracted an audience of hundreds of millions of viewers by optimizing for YouTube's algorithm. From posting stunt videos, such as burying himself alive to localizing his content with roughly a dozen channels dubbed in different languages, his ability to draw eyeballs has laid the groundwork for a global media empire. Even after scaling up and signing a deal with Amazon, he's held on to creative control through a hyperfocused founder-mode ethos.

"Obsession: I think that's how you can summarize him," says Brendan Gahan, the founder of the marketing agency Creator Authority. "It's like he can talk about YouTube and very little else. His knowledge base is not typical of most people's; it's very narrow and very deep."

Donaldson's distaste for the conventions of big media companies has gotten him in trouble — accusations of poor conditions on MrBeast production sets and internal staffer misconduct have created serious headaches, which the company recently sought to address through an internal review. The YouTuber scaled up so quickly by "not playing by the rules," as one former staffer told Business Insider. But as traditional media companies lose eyeballs to user-generated-content platforms like YouTube and TikTok, the MrBeast model, untamed as it is, can offer some useful lessons for Hollywood: bring creators into traditional media productions, give them a real stake in the work, allow them to be themselves, and produce content at a pace and style that feeds the appetites of digital audiences.

To get insight into the MrBeast empire, we talked with media executives both in Hollywood and at companies focused on creators, as well as people who have worked directly with Donaldson. We also combed through Donaldson's public statements and internal company documents, including a leaked MrBeast employee guidebook and 163 slides from a set of brand decks included in court filings. From our analysis, we landed on three key insights for traditional media companies trying to adapt to the rapidly changing media landscape. MrBeast's style may not fit the tastes of Hollywood's elite, but they'd better start taking some notes on his successful strategies — or risk getting left behind.

MrBeast is perhaps the most visible face of the creator economy, a fast-growing subset of influencers, vloggers, and media moguls who are taking on — and in some cases blowing past — the traditional entertainment power players. With a total addressable market of $250 billion as of 2023, the creator economy is thought to account for about 10% of the global media and entertainment industry, which includes print media, Hollywood, gaming, music, and more. Meanwhile, moviegoing has been steadily declining for decades in the US: The attendance tracker nScreenMedia found that the average American bought about two movie tickets in 2023, down from five in 2003.

Doug Shapiro, a media industry veteran who's now a senior advisor at Boston Consulting Group, estimates that while the creator media economy is a relatively small portion of the total media and entertainment market, it has accounted for almost half the market's growth. "It's going to be impossible for the traditional media players to maintain their same market share or mindshare in this emerging content economy."

But how? Big media companies' forays into building their own creator networks or making creator-led shows have largely been misses. (See: Disney's ill-fated acquisition of the YouTube network Maker Studios or the poor ratings of the NBC talk show hosted by the online sensation Lilly Singh.) And media companies have been distracted by the collapse of their traditional TV networks and the urgent need for streaming profitability. But in a global fight for eyeballs — especially those of the next generation — both MrBeast and the creator economy more broadly can offer some lessons for traditional Hollywood.

Rethink how you reward talent

For most of their history, Hollywood companies have assumed all the risk — and all the reward — of making entertainment. Talent, for the most part, was paid in a work-for-hire arrangement. Actors showed up, hit their marks, and let the system work its magic. This made sense in a time of sky-high costs just for the equipment required to get anything on film. That's all changed. Nowadays, anyone with an iPhone and a half-decent microphone can become a bona fide star.

Creators like MrBeast have taken on more of the responsibility for creating and distributing their content directly to fans. Instead of being one part of a larger production controlled by a studio, they're the lead actor, producer, director, and studio chief. This comes with more risks if a video flops, but it also gives the new crop of media moguls a greater sense of ownership over their work. In an internal MrBeast production guidebook, which we verified with two former staffers, Donaldson emphasized the importance of this ownership. "This channel is my baby, and I've given up my life for it," he wrote. He advised staffers to "take ownership and don't give your project a chance to fail," adding: "Dumping your bottleneck on someone and then just walking away until it's done is lazy, and it gives room for error."

"YouTubers are so attached to their channels," a second former MrBeast staffer said. "They've built them through blood, sweat, and tears for decades." The staffer, along with other ex-employees in this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. Their identities are known to BI.

With a flood of new tech lowering the cost of content creation, studios should consider sharing more of the rewards with talent and offering them more developmental support. Some Hollywood A-listers have already begun to take new compensation models seriously: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's production company, Artists Equity, is trying to remake the compensation system by giving performers less money upfront in exchange for a potential larger share of a project's post-release profits, among other models. This also creates a symbiotic relationship that can prevent frustrated stars from striking out on their own and heeding the siren call of YouTube.

Sharing some control with stars goes beyond finances. Creators who control their shows can get granular data, such as how many people subscribed to their channel and viewed and liked their videos, allowing them to better understand what their audience is gravitating toward. Legacy media and big tech entertainment companies, on the other hand, keep a tight grip on that information. While some studios may eschew giving up that level of data, younger creators might appreciate more generous information sharing.

"The cool thing about YouTube is they give us super detailed graphs for every video that show the exact second we lose a viewer on every single video," Donaldson wrote in his production guide. "Whether it is production, creative, or editing, you must always know what minute mark the content you are working on is. If you don't, then you're not doing it right."

Take a creator-like approach to content

Hollywood is used to making a movie or a season of a show and then making the audience wait a year or two for the next installation or sequel. Take "House of the Dragon," HBO's "Game of Thrones" spinoff, which was released about three years after the original series ended. That's not ideal for young people who have been conditioned by social media to have an ongoing connection with the creators they follow. Many of these new media figures post weekly or even daily. MrBeast, given his high production costs, posts once or twice a month on his main channel but more regularly uploads other formats, such as YouTube shorts. Corporate media must adapt to young watchers' voracious appetites or risk losing them as their audience.

The easiest place for old-school studios to try out this consistency is with reality TV and game shows — two formats tailor-made for short clips and a high volume of content. Britain's ITV recently struck a deal with YouTube to distribute hundreds of hours' worth of shows, including "Love Island" and "Vera." The deal also called for ITV to create clips, compilations, and fan content around the shows. Lionsgate and Sony are licensing shows and movies to Gaggl TV, a startup that distributes them to creators to watch with their followers on platforms like Amazon's Twitch. Adam Harris, a Gaggl TV cofounder, said this approach had been especially popular with game shows like "The Price Is Right" that have easy-to-follow formats and are interactive.

Going beyond slicing and dicing existing shows, some in Hollywood are casting creators in original programming, blurring the distinction between social stars and traditional stars. Streamers such as Roku and Tubi are making films starring creators (Tubi's "Sidelined," for example, includes the TikToker Noah Beck) that can help them connect with young audiences.

"Over the last six months, the interest from platforms in top creators has undergone a total reversal," says David Freeman, head of digital media at CAA, the powerful talent agency. "From 2014 to 2020, it was nearly impossible to get their attention. Now they understand the undeniable need to cater to Gen Z — and that means creators have to be part of the next generation of IP."

As more digital streaming platforms start to look like YouTube, with thumbnails and recommendations for other videos, traditional media will also need to embrace some of the tricks that have helped creators maintain attention.

"Traditional media doesn't think about the fact that if your first 30 seconds suck, people will click away," the first former MrBeast staffer said. They added that directors would have to relinquish some creative flexibility in order to optimize their videos.

"This is the era of retention farming," the second ex-MrBeast employee said.

Stay true to the creator

While Hollywood has occasionally taken this advice and cast social media superstars like Lilly Singh and the D'Amelios in their own shows, it often makes the mistake of trying to fit these new-school personalities into an old-school format — a late-night talk show in Singh's case, or reality in the case of "Inside Eats with Rhett and Link."

Instead of trying to bring in new voices to enliven creaky concepts, Hollywood should expand its notion of what a show can look like. In 2014, Jonathan Skogmo's media company, Jukin Media, sold a version of its popular YouTube bloopers show, "FailArmy," to Fox. Skogmo says it worked because instead of trying to copy the network version of the format, Jukin hewed to the original more unpolished style. "We took what we did on YouTube and made a 20-minute show," he says.

In short, if you bring a creator like MrBeast to a traditional platform, let them be themselves (while making sure their set is up to code).

"If I'm not excited to get in front of that camera and film the video, it's just simply not going to happen," Donaldson wrote in his internal production guide. "I'm willing to count to one hundred thousand, bury myself alive, or walk a marathon in the world's largest pairs of shoes if I must. I just want to do what makes me happy and ultimately the viewers happy."

Traditional media companies must also let creators work authentically, even if it means spending more money than a budget-conscious production normally would. The former MrBeast staffers described that costs-are-no-object attitude as central to the MrBeast growth story.

Members of the MrBeast team "hold themselves accountable to making the best version of a thing," the first former staffer said. "They really care about doing shit right."

Hollywood doesn't need to adopt the creator approach wholesale — the new school can pick up a few things from the old school, too. Online media stars are increasingly professionalizing their output with help from Hollywood-trained talent and riffing on tried-and-true entertainment formats to make shows that could be at home on the big screen.

For a hit video inspired by the competition show "Big Brother," the YouTuber Airrack invited 25 strangers to compete in challenges in his house over two days; it got 22 million views. And industry watchers say Amazon's "Beast Games," the competition show hosted by Donaldson and his crew which capitalized on his fame to become the service's most-watched unscripted series ever, is just the beginning of a tighter merging of worlds. Netflix recently greenlighted a season of The Sidemen's YouTube reality series and launched a show by the kids educator Ms. Rachel — rare examples of YouTubers moving to a global TV platform.

"Creators want to embrace Hollywood to a degree and vice versa," CAA's Freeman said. "We're going to see more high-profile projects like 'Beast Games' coming from the streamers."

As much as MrBeast can teach Hollywood, it's clear his forays into traditional media are rubbing off on him. In a recent interview, Donaldson said he'd worked hard to improve his storytelling and didn't want to be thought of as "just a YouTuber that knows how to manipulate an algorithm."

And Hollywood, to its credit, is starting to meet fans on the platforms where they're spending time. Disney recently invested in Epic Games, hoping to promote its famous characters to gamers. Warner Bros. has started to use the popular gaming platform Roblox to promote film releases. These experiments have been limited by Hollywood's fear of losing control of how its IP is portrayed, but it would do well to embrace young people's desire to interact with the content, even if it means ignoring some unauthorized uses.

The lines between Hollywood and the creator economy are likely to blur over time. But as the creator economy grows, Hollywood must offer an attractive opportunity to creators or accept continued decline.

"The big question, though, is whether creators truly need the streamers when their audiences are overwhelmingly consuming content on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok," Freeman says. "Time will tell."

Lucia Moses is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering media and entertainment.

Geoff Weiss is a senior reporter on Business Insider's media team.

Dan Whateley is a senior reporter at Business Insider covering social media and the music business.

• TikTok is testing a feature that lets users subscribe to products to receive repeat shipments.
• The feature is similar to Amazon's subscribe-and-save tool.
• Subscription orders could help merchants better predict revenue and manage their inventory.

TikTok is testing a new feature that allows users to subscribe to repeatedly receive products from its e-commerce platform Shop, according to two Shop partners with knowledge of the tool.

The tool, similar to Amazon's subscribe-and-save feature, encourages users to make repeat purchases of items such as vitamins or snacks in exchange for a discount. Sellers can lock in recurring revenue in return.

The Shop partners said the feature is not available to all sellers yet.

A TikTok spokesperson said the company regularly experiments with features to gather feedback and learn from its community. They said this feature hasn't yet been made available to the app's users.

The feature could create more predictable revenue for Shop sellers. Some have struggled with inventory management amid sales surges from viral videos or dips after video views drop off.

"Subscriptions on TikTok Shop are going to add convenience and savings," said Warren Jolly, CEO of the digital-ad firm adQuadrant, which gained early access to the feature. He said the move could keep shoppers consistently buying on TikTok rather than risk having them switch to Amazon or another platform.

Subscriptions are TikTok's latest move to bring its Shop product to parity with e-commerce competitors. It launched in the US in September 2023 following a year of beta testing. The company currently offers a variety of features for sellers, including logistics and fulfillment services and a dedicated app store.

As a relative newcomer, it's gained traction quickly. Last year, TikTok Shop pulled in $100 million in US sales on Black Friday alone. By some measures, such as repeat purchases, it has outperformed incumbents like Walmart.

Of course, TikTok's US e-commerce business could be abruptly cut off in a couple of months. The company is subject to a law that requires its parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the US app or effectively cease operating in the country.

A mix of companies and wealthy individuals have announced bids for TikTok. The company hasn't said whether it's open to a sale. In January, TikTok's lawyer told the Supreme Court that divesting would be "extraordinarily difficult" over any timeline.

February 10, 2025, 4:09 p.m. ET: This story has been updated to reflect additional details from TikTok.

• Some fashion brands are pausing influencer campaigns and blaming US tariffs.
• Halara and Shein have temporarily halted some campaigns.
• The moves came after Trump announced new tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico.

The trade wars have hit the influencer economy.

Halara, a women's activewear brand, said it was pausing some sponsorship campaigns until March, citing concerns about the business impact of new US tariffs, per an email sent to a talent manager and viewed by Business Insider.

The fast-fashion retailer Shein informed one talent manager through an agency that it was temporarily pausing collaborative videos. It told another it was deferring new campaign offers, saying the move was specific to creators with US audiences. In both instances, the company cited the US tariffs as the reason for its pause.

The talent managers spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their future business dealings. Their identities are known to BI.

Fashion brands that rely on Chinese manufacturing are some of the first to be affected by President Donald Trump's tariff policies.

In its email, Halara said it would spend the next few weeks changing its warehouse strategy to adapt to US tariff policies. The company advised its influencers not to shoot any videos before March, as the products they're meant to promote may change by that point.

Halara and Shein did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

Whether the pause affects some or all of the brands' US influencer-marketing spending was unclear.

Halara, founded in 2020 by Joyce Zhang, has leaned heavily on social media and influencers to build its business. The company has a big presence on TikTok; it has sold about 125,000 items through the app's e-commerce feature, Shop. The company runs an ambassador program for influencers and offers affiliate commissions to creators who boost sales.

Shein similarly leans on creators to drive up sales, sponsoring influencer trips and running an affiliate program offering up to 20% commissions.

Trump, in a February 1 executive order, imposed an additional 10% tariff on all Chinese goods and a 25% tariff on items from Canada and Mexico. Tariffs on the latter two countries have been paused.

Trump's order also removed a tax loophole known as the de minimis exemption that allowed brands like Shein and Temu to cheaply send goods to US consumers from China. Last week Trump delayed removal of the exemption to give the Commerce Department more time to prepare.

Mylen Yamamoto Tansingco, the CEO of the influencer talent management firm Clique-Now, said her client's brand campaigns had not been directly affected by the tariffs. But she said she was "anticipating a snowball effect" where increased pricing leads to less consumer spending, which then lowers marketing budgets.

The trade wars may creep into other parts of the creator economy

Influencer marketers aren't the only ones in the industry bracing for impact.

The creator agency The Network Effect works with a Chinese manufacturer for its Beyond Lost streetwear brand, founded by the influencer Alyssa McKay. The agency's cofounder Brian Nelson said the political back-and-forth posed daily worries.

"Currently we have a pretty big shipment for us on a boat on the way over" via UPS, Nelson said. "If any of this kicks into gear with China, we don't even know who pays what when it gets here."

The Network Effect is seeking to diversify its manufacturing partners and plans to eat any immediate tariff-related costs. But Nelson said the business "wouldn't be fine in a long-term scenario" without changes.

Canada is also an open question for the agency — though tariffs are paused — as it is Beyond Lost's second-biggest consumer market after the US. (Goods ship from its Chinese manufacturer to the US and then to Canada upon sale.)

"You have to look at the headlines every day to kind of see where the hockey puck's moving," Brian Mandler, the agency's other cofounder, said.

If you know more about the recent impact of US tariffs on influencer marketing contact the author at aperelli@businessinsider.com or through the encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 646-768-4720).

• Shadi Nayyer has joined Meta in a new role focused on metaverse creator and developer relationships.
• Nayyer's role overseeing ecosystem growth rolls up into the Reality Labs content organization.
• Prior to joining Meta, Nayyer led global creator programs at TikTok.

Meta has tapped former TikTok exec Shadi Nayyer to oversee a new team that will build relationships with creators and developers in its metaverse division, Reality Labs.

Nayyer's new role leading ecosystem growth falls under the content organization within Reality Labs. She told Business Insider she'll initially focus on creators who develop inside its virtual-reality game Horizon Worlds and other metaverse apps.

She plans to hire a team of developer advocates, community leaders, and program managers to host hackathons, attend third-party events, and run competitions and other community programs. Over time, the work will expand into other parts of the division, such as augmented reality, Nayyer said.

"A lot of what my focus is going to be on is essentially growing our developer creator ecosystem," she said. "Bringing on creators, builders, developers onto the Meta platform. Helping them learn about our products, about our tools, and just getting them into our various creator programs."

Nayyer was previously TikTok's head of creator programs.

Meta sees 2025 as a critical year for its metaverse work, per a recent internal memo from chief technology officer Andrew "Boz" Bosworth viewed by BI. Bosworth called out Horizon Worlds as an area of focus, saying that platform would need to "break out" for the company's long-term plans to come to fruition.

Horizon Worlds offers a mix of games, live events, and social features for Meta's Quest VR headsets, as well as mobile and desktop devices. In September, Meta product VP Aigerim Shorman said usage of the Horizon platform was up "5x compared to last year," and Horizon Worlds was a top-five app on the Quest 3 as measured by weekly users.

The company told investors during last week's fourth-quarter earnings that its Reality Labs unit hit $1.08 billion in revenue in the period. It expects operating losses in the division to increase in 2025, as they did in 2024.

Nayyer, who joined Meta last month, said her team will focus on driving up engagement from the metaverse developer community.

Prior to joining Meta, Nayyer oversaw creator programs and community at TikTok, where she worked on creator product marketing, partnerships, and community development, as well as its diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Before that, Nayyer worked on community marketing at Twitch.

Meta and TikTok did not respond to requests for comment.