Stealth TikTok ads pay creators up to $11,000 a month

Key Points

1. Everyday social users are paid to run secondary accounts posting ads disguised as ordinary videos
2. Undisclosed paid posts violate TikTok, Meta, YouTube guidelines and Federal Trade Commission rules
3. Enforcement is minimal, and many brands treat nondisclosure as an acceptable business risk

The latest:

Thousands of ordinary social-media users are earning four- and five-figure monthly sums running secondary TikTok and Instagram accounts that post paid promotions styled as personal videos, The Wall Street Journal reported. The practice, known as user-generated content or UGC, breaches the disclosure rules of every major platform and the Federal Trade Commission. Enforcement, advertising lawyers told the Journal, is scarce.

Details:

• How it looks: One 11-second TikTok viewed more than a million times shows a woman named Ceci reading a long breakup text while dictating a reply through the Aqua Voice app, the Journal reported. Scrolling the account reveals her being dumped repeatedly, each time for a different reason, each time using the same app.
• The pay: Ceci Beck was paid more than $800 to run the Aqua Voice account and said she averages $6,000 a month from UGC work, plus income from helping run an online creator academy. She said she was engaged when she posted the breakup videos and is now married.
• The marketplace: Nick Lawton, chief executive of the UGC marketplace Sideshift, which says it has more than one million registered creator accounts, described the model to the Journal as taking everyday people, paying roughly $20 a video and having them post an extreme amount. One Sideshift ad urges brands to hire an army of influencers.
• Why now: The Journal attributed the boom to an AI-driven wave of consumer software startups seeking cheap marketing, and to platform algorithms that now rank content by viewer interest rather than follower count, extending the reach of small accounts. Brands have also found audiences trust ordinary users more than large influencers.
• The workers: Brooks Langford, unable to find work in his field since graduating last year, splits his time between barista shifts and about five hours of UGC weekly, earning $1,000 to $2,000 a month across two or three brand accounts. Companies send him weekly briefings with scripts, visual hooks and captions.
• The top earners: Caryl Pagulayan, who works with tech startups, earned $11,000 in July after several videos went viral, for five to seven hours of work a week. She originally treated UGC as a steppingstone to a full-time marketing job and told the Journal she is now reconsidering that plan.
• The pressure: Kassi Meyer, a stay-at-home mother of two in Ohio who started UGC to help with household bills, asked her campaign manager whether to mark a video for the class-action app Collect as an ad. The reply, in a text reviewed by the Journal, was: “Say it’s not.”
• The brands: Most clients are small startups, but accounts have also promoted Deel, Grammarly, Kalshi and Brex, the Journal reported. A Kalshi spokeswoman said it is reviewing relationships with accounts that break its disclosure policy. Grammarly said it asks creators to tag posts and is refining its guidelines. Deel declined to comment; Brex and Polymarket did not respond.
• The brand view: Austin Zitting, head of marketing at Aqua Voice, said the app has no formal disclosure policies, adding that if the company does something wrong enough, someone will tell it, and it will then probably have to write some. Sideshift’s Lawton said the marketplace advises creators to follow all applicable disclosure requirements.
• The regulator: Rob Freund, a California e-commerce and advertising lawyer, said the FTC acts from time to time but has limited resources, and that enforcing social-media ad disclosure does not appear to be a current priority. The FTC declined to comment to the Journal.

Background:

Some creators argue FTC guidance leaves them room, or point to disclosures in their account bios and to contracts defining the accounts as brand-owned assets. Advertising attorneys said that does not necessarily protect them once they are paid for the content.

Between the lines:

The economics explain the silence. Meyer told the Journal she fears she would not be paid if she labeled her videos as ads, and Langford said easy cash outweighs the dishonesty he feels — pressures that sit alongside campaign managers instructing creators not to disclose. With enforcement rare, the cost of labeling a post falls on the lowest-paid person in the chain.

What’s next

Watch whether Kalshi’s review of noncompliant accounts produces public action, whether the FTC opens enforcement against UGC campaigns, and whether platforms move against accounts as commenters increasingly call out undisclosed ads.