I paid TikTok to find people who don't want to watch my videos.

On Friday, I streamed on Twitch and made a short clip from the stream. I decided to try TikTok Promote to see if spending money would help me reach more people.

I ran two campaigns.

The first campaign lasted 6 hours and cost $8.70. It got me 258 views and 11 new followers.

The second campaign is still running. So far, it's spent $28 and brought in 1,840 views and 45 new followers.

That's $36.70 for 56 new followers, or about 65 cents per follower.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, most of these followers are from countries outside the US, which isn't the audience I'm trying to reach. And even though the campaigns brought in thousands of views, most people didn't watch past the first 6 seconds.

If you're thinking about starting to post on TikTok and wondering whether you should spend money promoting your videos, I'd recommend saving your money for now.

You can pay to get your video in front of more people, but that doesn't mean those people are interested in what you're making. There's a difference between getting someone to press follow and getting someone to come back to watch your next video.

So why did I spend the money?

Because I wanted to unlock TikTok Live.

TikTok has a 50-follower requirement to go live, and I wanted to get past that as quickly as possible.

Gary Vee has been talking about going live every day on TikTok, especially because of its discoverability. People can stumble across your livestream while scrolling through their feed, even if they've never heard of you before.

I've started streaming on Twitch, where getting discovered as a new streamer is pretty difficult. When you're streaming to zero viewers, it's hard for anyone to find your channel in the first place.

So I figured spending $36.70 to unlock another way to reach people was worth the experiment.

What's interesting is how aggressively these platforms are pushing paid promotion.

TikTok has built an incredibly nice interface for giving them money. You can select a video, choose what you want to achieve, set a budget, and start promoting it within minutes.

This week, I also noticed that X added a giant hand pointing toward the Promote button on mobile. They're practically begging you to spend money.

And I think we're going to see a lot more of this.

As AI makes content easier and cheaper to create, there's going to be more content competing for the same amount of human attention.

Everyone can make videos, generate images, write posts, and publish things faster than ever before. But people still have the same 24 hours in a day.

Getting attention is going to become increasingly expensive.

I think platforms will keep pushing paid promotion, and creators will increasingly have to pay to get their content in front of the right people. Organic reach will become harder to rely on.

There's already a whole group of people making money on the internet because they understand how to run paid ads. They know how to find an audience, test different creatives, and turn advertising spend into revenue.

That's a pretty valuable skill to learn.

And honestly, I think there's a broader lesson here about spending money on yourself.

You shouldn't be stingy when it comes to experimenting with things that could help you grow.

Buy that AI subscription you've been considering. Try the premium plan. Run a few ads. Buy the domain you've been thinking about.

You'll probably waste some money along the way. I certainly did today.

But spending $36.70 taught me something about how TikTok promotion works, what kind of audience it attracts, and how much it costs to acquire followers. It also helped me get closer to trying something I wanted to do.

I'd rather spend a little money finding out whether something works than spend weeks wondering whether it's worth trying.