In March 2024, I posted a one-minute TikTok that I thought might interest a small corner of history buffs. Instead, it reached 1.4 million views.
The video was simple: a 64-second audio clip of President Richard Nixon phoning a young Senator Joe Biden in 1972 after Biden’s wife and infant daughter were killed in a tragic car accident. It’s raw, human, and unexpected. President Nixon’s voice carries compassion, and Biden sounds like a grieving father rather than a politician.
The feedback stunned me. But what everyone always wants to know is this:
How much does TikTok actually pay for a video that gets over a million views?
The short answer: $418.04.
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The Receipts
Here’s a breakdown:
• Total Views: 1,426,452
• Qualified Views (counted for payout): 353,600
• Total Rewards: $418.04
• RPM (Revenue per 1,000 qualified views): $1.18
• Engagement: 76K likes, 2,081 comments, 7,703 shares
• Average Watch Time: 23.4 seconds (on a 64s video)
• Full Video Watched: 14.85%
As you can see from the analytics: the video exploded, yet only about one in four views “qualified” under TikTok’s payout rules.
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Why Did This Video Go Viral?
Looking back, I can see four reasons:
1. Emotion: At its core, this is about grief, loss, and human compassion. Emotion makes content stick.
2. Historical Rarity: Most people had never heard this phone call before. Novelty is fuel for shares.
3. Political Curiosity: Nixon and Biden in the same story? Both sides of the aisle leaned in.
4. Comment Section Fire: People argued, compared, and debated — feeding the algorithm more engagement.
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The Money Lesson
Here’s the blunt truth: viral ≠ rich.
1.4 million views sounds massive, but the payout was just over $400. Why? Because TikTok counts only certain views as “qualified” (depending on region, device, and watch time). That means three-quarters of the people who watched my video never factored into the payout at all.
If TikTok had counted every view at the same RPM, that one video would have paid me closer to $1,600.
By comparison, YouTube Shorts generally pays more per view thanks to stronger ad placement, and Instagram sometimes offers bonus programs. TikTok, for now, keeps creators guessing.
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The Bigger Picture
The money was nice, but the real reward was realizing that history can go viral.
In an era where most viral TikToks are dances, pranks, or trending sounds, people stopped scrolling to listen to a grainy phone call from 1972. That’s powerful.
It showed me that audiences crave human stories — especially when they reveal a side of powerful figures we rarely see. Nixon as a consoler. Biden as a grieving father.
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Final Thoughts
TikTok didn’t make me rich off this video. But it proved something more valuable: if you can tap into emotion, novelty, and humanity, even something fifty-years-old can hold its own in today’s algorithm.