The watch exchange

Ordering: you pick a video and, if you are spending points, a rewatch tier of one, two or three viewings. The page quotes the delivery from the video's own length and the tier before you confirm, so a long video at three loops is never quoted as if it were a short one watched once.

Giving: the app opens the video in TikTok itself — a universal link on iOS, an intent on Android that resolves to whichever TikTok build the phone has — and stamps the moment you left on the server. You watch, you come back, and the time away is measured from that stamp rather than from a countdown on the page, because both phone operating systems freeze a page's timers the instant it goes into the background, which is exactly where the page is while you are in TikTok.

The gate is 95% of the video's length, times the rewatch tier. Come back early and the screen says how many seconds are still to go rather than pretending the watch is done; the pacing rails are checked before you leave, so you are never sent to watch something that cannot be recorded when you return.

Every watch counts toward the 40-action daily cap and is followed by a cooldown of 45 to 210 seconds drawn fresh each time.

Every other action on the board has one multiplier. Watch has a table, and the reason is that "a watch" is not one thing.

Watching a twelve-second video through costs a viewer twelve seconds. Watching a ninety-second one through costs ninety, and watching it three times costs nearly five minutes. Charging the same for all three would mean the creator asking for the most attention pays the least for it.

So the cost is a duration band multiplied by a rewatch tier. A short unlooped watch is 1×. A long video watched three times through is 2.25 × 2.3, which is 5.175× — roughly one delivery per point rather than 5.

The bands are published in full rather than averaged. An average would be a number that describes no actual transaction.

Watch time is the most valuable signal on TikTok, which is exactly the argument for shipping it first and exactly the argument against.

A watch is the least accountable of the four actions. The creator who spent points cannot see who watched, and the person who watched has only their own word for it. Every other exchange on the board is easier to confirm.

Opening with the action that is hardest to check, on a platform where the population is still small, would have meant asking members to trust the delivery numbers before anything had demonstrated they were worth trusting. The comment exchange shipped first for the opposite reason: its delivery is visible under the video.

Watch is built, tested and held. It has one vote per member behind it like the other two, and no date, because the vote has not finished.

A watch counts against the 40-action daily cap and the randomised cooldown of 45 to 210 seconds between actions, so a session cannot be a burst.

Matched delivery stays under 30% of a video's own reach. On watch specifically this is the rail that matters most, because view counts are public on TikTok and a video whose views are mostly matched is visibly odd in a way a save count is not.

A save is only ever offered as the second half of a watch-then-save pair on the same video. That pairing rule lives in the watch flow, which is part of why the two exchanges are described together even though neither is open.