Gift or Rent? How TikTok Reconfigures Value, Labor and Precarity for African Entrepreneur Creators

Abstract The rapid expansion of Africa's creator economy has positioned TikTok's virtual gifting system as a critical revenue stream for thousands of entrepreneur-creators, yet scholarly understanding of how these platform-mediated transactions reconfigure value, labor, and precarity in African contexts remains largely undocumented. This study asks whether TikTok LIVE gifting functions as a hybrid value form—simultaneously gift-like at the level of relational experience and rent-like at the level of platform architecture—and how this hybridity relates to creators' perceived extraction and experienced precarity. Employing a convergent mixed-methods design with quantitative surveys (n=384) and semi-structured interviews (n=20) among TikTok entrepreneur-creators in Nigeria and Kenya, the study tests three hypotheses linking perceived gift-commodity hybridity (PGCH), aspirational labor orientation (ALO), income dependence, and creator precarity (CP). Findings reveal that PGCH negatively predicts perceived platform rent extraction (β=-.178), income dependence rather than total income predicts precarity across all three sub-dimensions (β=.196), and ALO positively predicts PGCH (β=.175), with the PGCH→CP effect running almost entirely through rent perception (94% mediated). Critically, qualitative data reveal that creators actively manage gift and commodity meanings simultaneously, contradicting a misrecognition in literature. The study contributes a synthesized "hybrid value form" concept extending platform-gifting scholarship to African economic infrastructures which has excluded it for years, identifies embodied precarity as an unmeasured dimension, and provides evidence that platform power is secured through withholding disclosure rather than deceiving creators. Implications for platform governance, creator advocacy, and the theorization of digital value are discussed.