Meanwhile, a different monetisation model has been quietly outperforming all of them for creators with far smaller audiences: live selling. Not promoting products for a brand. Actually selling them — running shoppable live streams where the audience buys in real time, and the creator keeps retail margin rather than an affiliate's sliver.
Why margin beats commission
The arithmetic is worth spelling out. An affiliate creator promoting a £30 product might earn a couple of pounds per conversion, after driving traffic somewhere else to complete the sale. A live seller selling their own £30 item — sourced wholesale at a fraction of that — keeps the spread between cost and hammer price, minus platform fees in the region of ten percent.
Same audience, same hour on camera, several times the revenue per transaction. And the sale happens inside the stream, with in-app checkout, rather than depending on viewers clicking out to a link in the description — the step where affiliate funnels traditionally die.
Platforms have built serious infrastructure around this. TikTok Shop lets a host pin products with live pricing while viewers check out without leaving the broadcast. Whatnot runs auction mechanics that turn selling into a spectator sport. Both handle payments and generate shipping labels, which means a creator's operational lift is packing parcels, not building a store.
The engagement flywheel nobody expects
Here is the counterintuitive part: creators who start selling often find their engagement improves. A live sale is structurally interactive in a way a talking-head stream is not. Viewers ask questions about items, bid against each other, celebrate wins in chat. The countdown on an auction gives every segment a stake. Fashion sellers in particular report audiences treating streams as appointment viewing — the same ritual energy as a drop, on a weekly schedule.
That schedule matters algorithmically too. Live platforms reward consistency, and a selling stream gives a creator a reason to be consistent that "going live to hang out" never quite does.
The part that separates creators from sellers
What stops most creators is not the camera work — they have that — but the retail side: what do you actually sell, and where does it come from?
The naive answer, buying random liquidation pallets and hoping, is how creators discover that retail has skills too. The professional answer has become considerably more accessible. A tier of B2B wholesale suppliers now serves live sellers specifically, offering branded surplus stock — new items from overproduction and past seasons, not second-hand — in curated lots with a packing list and per-piece pricing. A creator can source branded lots for live selling knowing before the stream exactly which items they hold, what each cost, and therefore what margin each bid represents.
Knowing cost per piece transforms the on-camera experience more than it sounds like it would. Opening bids stop being guesses. "Deal" segments can be planned as loss-leaders rather than accidents. And the creator can talk about products with the confidence of someone who chose them from a manifest rather than excavated them from a mystery box.
Who this actually fits
Live selling is not for every creator. It suits those with engaged communities in demonstrable niches — fashion, sneakers, accessories, collectibles, beauty — where seeing an item on camera genuinely informs the purchase. It requires treating part of the week as a retail operation: sourcing, stock control, packing. And it rewards hosts who enjoy the improvisational energy of working a live room, which is a different muscle from editing a polished video.
But for mid-sized creators tired of monetisation models that only work at the top of the pyramid, it is arguably the most undervalued path available right now: real margin, platform-native checkout, an engagement format that strengthens rather than interrupts the content — and a wholesale supply chain that has finally organised itself around people exactly their size.
The creator economy spent a decade renting audiences to advertisers. The live sellers just opened shops instead.
