Results of eight months of TikTok effect creating
I've been creating TikTok effects fairly regularly until recently when life got busy. My motivations were these:
- I'm into augmented reality
- 2D & 3D painting and artistic work is fun
- Wanted to see what the results were, because the actual creating is not that time consuming and fairly enjoyable
- Here's my TikTok
Here's some stats of where I'm at after eight months of creating (Mar 2025):
- Created effects: about 70 (quite a pace, looking back)
- Main viewers: Pakistan 22.5%, Burkina Faso 8.2%
- Main creators using the effects: Indonesia 22%
- Viral effects: 2 (over 1M views each)
- Biggest effect: 1.1M views
- Total views: 2.3M
- Views last month: 1.1M
- Video posts by users: 4.2k
- Effect tries: 160k
- Shares: 11k
- Likes: 115k
- Global top 1% of creators
- Money made: Zero, lol
Other notes
- You can learn more about creating TikTok effects here - https://effecthouse.tiktok.com/
- My TikTok profile is a modest testing ground with 537 followers, 5k likes
- Although not really related, I do have a TikTok business account
- Tested running TikTok ads for some of my gifts in my online store
- I've had creator agents contact me for collabs
- Tested live streaming and earnt $0.16 cents
- Live streaming agents reaching out with offers to join their agencies
- TikTok has gamified the creator ecyosystem with levels. I'm level silver, once you get to Gold and Platinum, you start earning $ for your effects.
What has the effect creating translated to?
- New followers on TikTok from creating the effects: Likely zero as I don't post videos about my effects on my account
- Money: Zero dollars so far. You need 3 videos that have been used (and posted) over 1k times to get monetised. I have 1 with 2 more working their way towards 1k
- Some very interesting insights into who likes what, how and why people use the effects
- Quite a bit of fun!
Learnings
- The creation software is getting quite sophisticated but is still accessible and simple to use for creators
- The drag and drop user interface is at a level for a non-programming artists like me
- Effects get tested and served to audiences just like TikTok videos and controlled by algorithms
- Viral effects can take off immediately
- Anything over 100 video posts (100 people use it and post publicly) and the effect will generally grow pretty big
- Previously, effects grew and stopped growth completely. The algorithm seems to have changed though, old effects I created are getting rediscovered and growing again
- The analytics in the TikTok app are updated live, whereas the web analytics in your dashboard are updated overnight
- TikTok effect analytics are not in the TikTok studio (where your general account and LIVE stats are). WHY I have no idea, so figuring out the bigger picture takes some analysis
- Also, the analytics for effects in the web dashboard are very basic. You don't learn much from what's provided
- Effects are vetted for any naughty stuff
- Brand-wise, there are NO RULES. You can post whatever the heck you like. I can impersonate Pepsi and the effects still get through
Wrap up
It's been an interesting time investment and my motivation remains the same, to just have a bit of fun in between life and see what happens when / if I get monetised.
It's an interesting thing to have so many people across the world use your art on themselves. I hope it's brought some joy to some.
If you're looking to give it a go, I would encourage you to check out the Effect House website and do some of the learning tutorials. And there's a community where people discuss effects.
My approach has been to make interesting, human-made effects. I think I tested the AI functions once. It's definitely a long term thing to get monetised. So I expect studios with teams would be able to smash the effect creation and then the question would be, how much would they make from the traffic generated.
Catch me on threads if you'd like to talk more TikTok Effects.
Jeremy Burton is a TikTok effect creator, based in Perth, Western Australia.