Since June, 27-year-old Li Na has been spending at least two hours a day on her new side job, TikTok. She posts up to three makeup videos of her every day on her own account, sharing tips and showcasing dramatic before and after transformations. ButLi does not create videos. Instead, she finds her clips viral on Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu, and after making some simple edits, she reposts them on TikTok. Ms. Lee and many others like her posted these videos in hopes that these videos would also go viral on her TikTok and that the creators of the app could earn income through her marketing through her funds and affiliate marketing. I am.
That practice is known as Banyun In Chinese, it means “movement” or “smuggling.” It has gained a lot of attention in Japan over the past year, with “masters'' and influencers selling guides and training sessions for making money through Banyun. They promise that once trained, anyone can amass a huge following on TikTok, promote products, and make money with just a few hours a day.
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But so-called gurus are selling an outdated and misleading dream, said George Gu, founder of NewMe, a social e-commerce company specializing in TikTok. Rest of the world. TikTok's platform policies do not allow posting content that infringes on the intellectual property rights of others. If reported, these accounts risk being deleted, suspended, or permanently terminated.
“this [banyun] is not allowed on TikTok, and when we discover this kind of behavior, we remove content and ban accounts,” TikTok spokesperson Jamie Favazza wrote in an email. Rest of the world.
Mindy Liu, 22, decided to try Banyuun after reading a post on lifestyle social media app Xiaohongshu about a woman who claimed to have started an e-commerce business on TikTok from her home. Liu contacted her Xindi Consulting account, the account that made her post, and was quickly connected to her “mentor” on WeChat. This mentor made the process seem easy, and she told Liu that she could quickly earn $1,000 a week from her marketing to TikTok creators and affiliate marketing. . Liu's mentor also offered her $550 for her training, which was more than half of her savings. She ended up paying for it.
Instead, Liu received a thick document of more than 100 pages detailing the necessary steps. She chose home goods as her specialty and scoured Chinese social media for popular videos featuring organizational tips and product hacks. TikTok is blocked in China, so Liu needed a reliable virtual private network (VPN). She bought her one from her mentor for an additional $70 per year. She used the app CapCut to edit the video, cropping it and flipping it from left to right to avoid copyright infringement.
Lee, who runs an account dedicated to makeup, deletes one frame every two to three seconds of a video before reposting it to TikTok. She was promised that the resulting difference in video quality would be nearly impossible for humans to notice, but would be enough to fool TikTok.
Despite her efforts, the rewards never followed. Two months later, Lee's makeup account has just 84 followers. Her reposted video was very popular on Douyin, but only received more than a few hundred views on TikTok. Most have less than 10 likes on her.
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Liu tried to contact her mentors on WeChat, but found that they had disappeared and their accounts had been deleted. “I'm in deep emotional and financial trouble right now,” Liu said. Rest of the world. “I started making TikTok banyun because I didn't have much money. Now I'm in debt because of the training fees.”
Even banyun posters who have achieved some success have a hard time maintaining it. Xiaoting Wang paid Banyun's mentor about $700 to start his business. She started her Some Pets account last October because she has experience in video editing and found it easy to adjust and repost her videos. By February of the following year, one of her accounts had grown enough to qualify for TikTok's Creator Fund. In Banyun's strategy, it is the final step to becoming wealthy. But since then, Wang's income has hovered between $1 and $3, far below the $100 a day promised by her mentor. When she reached out to her mentors for further advice, they disappeared.
“It's been exhausting,” Wang said. Rest of the world. “I started to think it wasn't worth spending three hours of my time every day.” In May, she sold all her accounts to a live streaming agency for 2,000 yuan ($278).
Despite their struggles, Li and Liu aren't quitting TikTok just yet. Ms. Lee plans to create her own makeup videos in hopes of being more successful than stealing content from others. Meanwhile, Liu is eyeing the future of his TikTok Shop, ByteDance's new e-commerce marketplace. She is part of her WeChat group called “TikTok Players,” which is joined by other content farmers and product sellers. They are all looking for the right way to monetize their accounts to make the most of the inevitable rise of TikTok e-commerce around the world.
“Chinese people are used to buying products on Douyin,” Liu said. “It's only a matter of time before foreigners catch up.”
