TikTok’s new Pulse Premiere will allow publishers to sell ads alongside their posts and keep half the revenue, a move to engage institutional creators in addition to the influencers and app-savvy individuals that have been the video-sharing platform’s mainstay. An offshoot of TikTok’s Pulse program revenue-sharing plan, available for the top 4 percent of creators’ posts, Pulse Premiere permits ads against all posts from publishers including Condé Nast, NBCUniversal and Vox Media. Advertisers have embraced TikTok to reach Gen Z. Sensor Tower predicts the ByteDance-owned company will secure 2.5 percent of the domestic digital ad market in 2023.

TikTok’s U.S. ad revenue is projected to hit $6.83 billion this year, a 36 percent increase from 2022 according to Insider Intelligence. Worldwide, the app has been downloaded over 4 billion times, says Sensor Tower, and more than 150 million Americans now use it.

The opportunity to sell ads in one of social media’s hottest apps “comes as many publishers are struggling to deal with tough economic conditions, resulting in cost-cutting and layoffs across the industry,” writes The Wall Street Journal, noting that for TikTok, the upside is “another revenue opportunity” as well as the chance “to build the site’s relationship with advertisers and publishers.”

“TikTok is where advertising becomes entertainment, audiences pay attention, and brands drive real impact,” the company said in an announcement, touting statistics like “73 percent of people feel a deeper connection to brands they interact with on TikTok, and 93 percent of users take action on content they see in the For You feed.”

“The potential there is pretty significant,” Condé Nast global chief revenue officer Pam Drucker Mann told WSJ, which says publishers have embraced TikTok but complained about a lack of revenue opportunities. Through its Vogue brand, Condé Nast has created the “Beauty Secrets” series on the social platform that Mann says can now be monetized.

“We have a really strong partnership with YouTube,” she said. “We have a really strong partnership with Instagram. This partnership with TikTok is really just taking off.”

Additional publisher partners at launch will include Dotdash Meredith, Hearst Magazines, Major League Soccer, NBCUniversal, UFC and WWE, says MediaPost, writing that the Pulse Premiere brand ads will span “more than a dozen categories, including lifestyle, sports, entertainment and education.”