Business

Have followers and something to sell? TikTok may want to make a deal

Published

1 year ago

December 12, 2024

Have followers and something to sell? TikTok may want to make a deal

It is just past 10 p.m. and Aaliyah Arnold, the 20-year-old founder of BossUp Cosmetics, is selling to the TikTok universe.

As she livestreams from a Culver City filming location, about 750 people around the world watch her announce a flash sale for a mystery box containing six to eight BossUp products. Typically priced at $101.96, the bundle is now 49% off — for the next few minutes only. On viewers’ smartphone screens, a countdown timer and a red “Buy” button appear, along with a flurry of heart emojis.

“Make sure you’re shopping shopping shopping till you can’t shop no more!” Arnold, in a light pink Santa Claus sweatshirt and a full face of glam, says into one of several cameras arranged around her. To the side of the makeshift stage, members of a production crew, fueled by energy drinks and a steady stream of fast-food deliveries, ready the next group of products.

Arnold and co-host Daniel Rene hype heavily discounted BossUp products during a marathon TikTok livestream filmed in Culver City last month.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Arnold is 10 hours into a marathon selling spree and still has two hours to go. Like a Gen Z version of QVC, TikTok Live shopping events are part of a push by the social media platform to combine the convenience of mobile commerce and the frenzied consumerism of limited-time deals with interactive, unscripted entertainment. By the time her livestream ends at midnight, Arnold will have racked up $70,000 in sales and 10,000 new followers.

TikTok launched TikTok Shop — a feature that enables users to buy directly within the app — in the U.S. last year, and since then small-business owners, celebrities and major retailers have been using the livestreaming function to boost their sales and engage with customers in real time. Brands might use a Live to unveil a line of boots and take questions from viewers on sizing, or to demonstrate how to use a new hairstyling tool or kitchen gadget.

Although anyone with at least 1,000 followers can livestream themselves, TikTok has been reaching out to influential users like Arnold who have large followings and a proven ability to sell and inviting them to be a part of its TikTok Shop Partner program.

In exchange for a cut of the action, the company offers professional services to help sellers turbocharge their businesses. That includes helping them produce, as Arnold described, “huge mega livestreams” — splashy multi-hour events professionally filmed in studios, event spaces and homes around Los Angeles.

TikTok’s push into the e-commerce market comes amid a backdrop of uncertainty over the company’s future in the country. The app faces a nationwide ban after years of back and forth with the U.S. government over national security concerns; the ban is scheduled to go into effect Jan. 19 unless TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, divests its U.S. operations.

Online live selling has been a retail phenomenon for years in China but has been slower to catch on in the U.S., where it accounts for only a tiny fraction of e-commerce revenue. That’s despite the 1990s popularity of television channels like QVC and the Home Shopping Network, and more recent live-shopping efforts by tech companies and retail brands including Amazon. In 2022, Facebook shut down its live-selling feature after two years; Instagram pulled the plug a few months later.

Livestreaming e-commerce was estimated to total $31.7 billion in the U.S. last year, according to Coresight Research.

“This pales in comparison to China’s livestreaming market, which was valued at $512 billion in 2022, revealing the significant growth opportunity in the U.S. market,” the firm said.

With a built-in audience of 170 million American users, many of them extremely online young adults well-versed in shopping on their mobile devices, TikTok is trying to push the watch-and-shop trend into the mainstream.

Live selling is “redefining the future of shopping on TikTok Shop,” said Nico Le Bourgeois, head of U.S. operations for TikTok Shop. He said the number of Live shopping sessions hosted on the app every month has nearly tripled in the last year.

Longer and higher-quality Lives drive more sales on TikTok Shop; that’s a win for sellers and for the social media company, which takes a single-digit percentage cut of sales on the platform, set at 6% and called a referral fee. Le Bourgeois declined to say how much revenue live selling has generated but said the number of people shopping on TikTok Shop every month has nearly tripled since its launch 15 months ago.

When they told me, “Can you do Live for 12 hours?” I was like, “You guys are sick, no.”

— Magdalena Peña, founder of beauty and hair-care brand Simply Mandys

TikTok Lives have become a pillar of brands’ sales strategies for the holiday season, and cheerfully chaotic livestreams are being held around the clock. From Nov. 13 through Dec. 2, nearly half a million Live shopping sessions were hosted on TikTok, for a total of more than 660,000 hours.

On Nov. 24, rapper Nicki Minaj hosted a two-hour livestream for her line of press-on nails that became the highest-viewed TikTok Shop Live ever, with 80,000 viewers simultaneously watching at one point. A few days later, Canvas Beauty Brand founder Stormi Steele surpassed $2 million in sales during her Black Friday livestream, a new record for a single TikTok Live.

The foray into e-commerce marks an evolution for a platform that had been known primarily as a place to endlessly scroll through frothy short-form videos. In short order, the company has shown that it “isn’t just entertainment — it’s a retail accelerator,” Oliver Chen, a retail analyst and Columbia Business School professor, wrote last month.

Arnold started BossUp when she was 14 and joined TikTok a year later in 2019. She would spontaneously host livestreams by broadcasting herself from her iPhone, which grew her fan base and got the word out about her burgeoning cosmetics brand.

But if viewers wanted to buy products, Arnold had to direct them to BossUp’s website because TikTok wasn’t shoppable back then. Many wouldn’t follow through.

Arnold founded BossUp when she was 14 and joined TikTok a year later. She would casually livestream from her iPhone, which grew her fan base and got the word out about her burgeoning beauty company.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

After the introduction of TikTop Shop in September 2023, BossUp sales swelled and Arnold’s casual livestreams caught the attention of TikTok. The company emailed Arnold with an offer to set her up with a Los Angeles agency called Yowant that specializes in working with online creators.

Arnold now flies from her home near Houston to L.A. every few weeks to host lengthy TikTok Live shopping sessions produced by the agency, which negotiates payment directly with its clients. Yowant provides her with producers and engineers, and assembles a stage with lighting, cameras and large monitors that display questions and comments as soon as viewers type them.

TikTok Shop employees, meanwhile, help her decide on a sales strategy for each Live, planning out the optimal date, a catchy soundtrack, how steep the discounts should be and which third-party affiliate products she should sell alongside her own, for which she receives a commission.

TikTok Shop has built me up like crazy.

— Aaliyah Arnold, founder of BossUp Cosmetics

Right at noon on the day of her Live last month in Culver City, the crew lets out a roar of cheers as the cameras are turned on.

“Deals and sales and giveaways — you don’t want to miss it, join in join in join in!” Arnold shouts over the commotion. “The biggest Live we’ve ever done, it’s starting right now…. Get a drink, get a snack, let’s go!”

“This is so overstimulating,” types one viewer.

Arnold and co-host Daniel Rene kick things off with a flash deal for BossUp’s Color Changing Lip Oil, usually $12.99 but marked down to $5. “Tap tap tap, shop shop shop!” she says before reminding viewers that shipping is free. Orders begin to pour in.

Seconds later a bullhorn blares, signaling the end of the deal, and Arnold is immediately on to the next discount. She does several makeup tutorials during the Live, deftly lining her lips a deep mahogany shade as a cameraman zooms in on her voluminous pout.

“People pay good money for lips like that!” Rene says approvingly.

In an interview with The Times before the livestream began, Arnold said TikTok Shop “has built me up like crazy.” She declined to provide revenue figures, but said that in the 12 months after TikTok Shop was introduced, BossUp sales increased nearly 500% compared with the 12 months prior.

That enabled her to purchase a house in June and bring on family members as employees. She bought a truck for her grandfather and a packaging warehouse for her fast-growing business.

Arnold’s recent TikTok Live in Culver City brought in $70,000 in sales over 12 hours.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Despite the uncertainty around TikTok’s future, business owners are forging ahead with all-out Live sessions in the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Over six days starting the day before Thanksgiving, Magdalena Peña, the founder of beauty and hair-care brand Simply Mandys, hosted three TikTok Live sessions for a combined 29 hours. The first brought in more than $1 million in sales.

Like Arnold, Peña was approached by employees at TikTok Shop shortly after the e-commerce feature was rolled out.

“When they told me, ‘Can you do Live for 12 hours?’ I was like, ‘You guys are sick, no,’” she recalled. “There’s no way.”

The professional services and other perks that came with TikTok’s support, however, persuaded her to reconsider. The company, for example, offered free advertising and to pay for 30% discounts for first-time buyers.

There were some stipulations: Peña, 37, could no longer include her daughter in her livestreams because she was underage; wasn’t able to showcase products not linked to TikTok Shop; and had to ship orders within two days.

“The better you follow the rules,” she said, “the more TikTok helps you.”

Since partnering with the company, she has filmed TikTok Live shopping sessions in Culver City and West Hollywood. Peña is responsible for paying her travel costs to the Live sessions, driving with her husband and business partner from their home in Sanger, Calif.

That is, until a few weeks ago, when the couple bought a small plane. Simply Mandys’ revenue through November of this year was already quadruple what it was in 2023 — a jump Peña credits to her Live events on TikTok, which she called a “total game-changer.”

She said she is still adjusting to the frequent travel and the long days of filming, finding motivation in the adrenaline rush that comes when she sees the sales figures climb during her Lives.

“I do everything possible to hit the goal,” she said. “I tell my team, ‘I’m not leaving here until I hit that number.’”

Business

Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperature Prompt Investigation After Unusual Spikes

Published

1 hour ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

Polymarket Bets on Paris Temperature Prompt Investigation After Unusual Spikes

Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.

Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.

“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.

He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.

The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.

One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.

As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.

Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.

“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”

On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.

On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.

In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.

Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.

Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.

The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.

It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.

On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.

Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.

Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.

As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.

“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”

Business

California’s jet fuel stockpile hits two-year low as war strangles oil supplies

Published

2 hours ago

April 24, 2026

Press Room

California’s jet fuel stockpile hits two-year low as war strangles oil supplies

As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.

The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.

The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.

“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”

As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.

Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.

“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.

Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.

Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.

“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”

California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.

The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.

“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”

Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.

The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.

The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.

California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.

“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”

In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.

The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.

“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”

The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.

Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.

The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.

“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.

Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.

Business

Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Published

13 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Press Room

Nike to Cut 1,400 Jobs as Part of Its Turnaround Plan

Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.

In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”

“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”

Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.

In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.

The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.

“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.

Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.

The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.

Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.

Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.