Ceci is reading a long breakup text. The caption asks, in all caps, whether he’s really ending it over this. She dictates her reply while an on-screen widget shows Aqua Voice transcribing. Eleven seconds, more than a million views. Click through to her account and she’s dumped again — different reason, same app. Ceci Beck was happily engaged when she posted, is now married, and was paid more than $800 to run that account.
The Journal’s Celia Bernhardt calls it UGC — user-generated content — and it’s a booming side hustle. The posts look like ordinary TikTok or Instagram fodder, usually with no ad label, which breaks TikTok, Meta Platforms (META) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL) YouTube guidelines, and FTC rules. Aqua Voice’s marketing head, Austin Zitting, told the paper the app has no formal disclosure policy and would write one if someone complained. Beck says she averages $6,000 a month from UGC, plus income from helping run an online creator academy.
Twenty dollars a video, posted by the thousand
Two things built this market: AI spawned a crowd of consumer-app startups hungry for cheap marketing, and the platforms’ algorithms now favor what viewers like over follower counts, lifting small accounts. Sideshift, a marketplace claiming more than 1 million registered creator accounts, pays regular people about $20 a video to post in volume, by CEO Nick Lawton’s description; he says it advises creators to follow disclosure rules. Brooks Langford, a barista who graduated last year, clears $1,000 to $2,000 a month for about five hours a week, juggling two or three accounts, one per brand, from scripts and hooks sent weekly. Caryl Pagulayan made $11,000 in July on five to seven hours a week after several videos went viral.
The clients aren’t all tiny. Accounts have promoted Deel, Grammarly, Kalshi and Brex, and the Journal previously traced misleading videos of students winning fake Polymarket bets to a UGC campaign. Then there’s Kassi Meyer, an Ohio stay-at-home mother of two whose family is struggling with debt. Before her first video for Collect, a class-action-finder app owned by Canada’s Ferrix Labs, she asked her campaign manager whether to mark it as an ad. The answer came by text, with a smiley face: say it isn’t. Rob Freund, a California advertising lawyer, told the paper the FTC has limited resources and other priorities; the FTC declined to comment. Langford’s summary: “easy cash outweighs the slight dishonesty I feel.”
Our read
Two planning notes, one for each side of the phone. If you’re the one posting, that money is self-employment income: ordinary income tax plus roughly 15.3% self-employment tax (half of it deductible), quarterly estimates, and nobody withholding for you. Six thousand a month with nothing set aside is how a side hustle turns into an ugly April. The upside: the same status unlocks a Solo 401(k) or SEP-IRA that can shelter a big share of that cash; open it the month the checks start.
For the viewer, the rule’s simpler. Treat any unlabeled testimonial as an ad until shown otherwise — especially for a betting app, fintech account or class-action finder. The person in the video may be sincere. She may also be on her third breakup this month. The ordinary-looking post is valuable precisely because it doesn’t look like an ad, and the agency meant to police it, by one advertising lawyer’s account, has other priorities. Your skepticism is the enforcement.