Voting in the first TikTok Awards Southeast Asia closes at 11.59pm (Singapore time) on 26 October 2026. Under the rules in TikTok’s announcement, every user gets at least 15 votes a day to spread across Singapore’s 33 entries. The nominees include humour creator Ian Thio, who films family videos with his grandmother, and 73-year-old Cik Rose, whose daughter’s account documents her deadlifting 67.5kg.
TikTok’s own users decide the results. TikTok says the top-voted Singaporean in each of the 11 categories will be named a Country Representative on 5 November, and that the Southeast Asia Winners will be announced on 27 November in Bali, Indonesia.
How to Vote From Singapore
🗓️ Date: Voting runs from 12 to 26 October 2026
⏰ Time: Voting closes at 11.59pm (Singapore time) on 26 October 2026
📍 Location: The TikTok app
🗳️ How to vote:
1. Log in to the TikTok app.
2. Search #TikTokAwardsSEA in the in-app search bar, or use the microsite link in TikTok’s announcement.
3. Tap the Vote buttons next to your favourite creators.
🔢 Votes: At least 15 per day per user. You can use them on any Country Nominee across all categories, and you can put several votes on the same nominee or category.
🇸🇬 Singapore Country Representatives: Announced 5 November 2026
🏆 Southeast Asia Winners: Announced 27 November 2026 in Bali, Indonesia
Because you can stack votes, a vote count measures how hard a creator’s fans rally inside the app. It doesn’t measure what that creator earns. The published income figures, covered further down, tell a more mixed story.
33 Entries, 11 Categories
TikTok announced the awards on 12 October 2026 under the theme The Ones Who Spark It. The official newsroom post sets out the format:
- Each country has 11 categories with three nominees each.
- The top-voted local creator in each category becomes a Country Representative.
- Country Representatives go forward to compete for the title of Southeast Asia Winner.
Here is the full Singapore list. Search a handle in the app to see that creator’s work before you spend your daily votes.
- Creator of the Year: Denise Teo (@supercatkei), Ian Thio (@ianthioo), Caitanya Tan (@caitofalltraits)
- Rising Creator of the Year: Ashley Kiara (@ashleykiaramusic), Dylan Chia (@dchtoons), Melvin Ong (@melvinoyx)
- Education: Kong Man Jing (@justkeepthinking), Dhevarajan Devadas, Dhev (@historyogi), Pedro Shiu (@p1kazoo)
- Sports: Gladys Lam (@gladyslamx), Ash Hashim (@ashfutbolita), Shaun Ye (@shaunye_)
- Food: Ng Jia Xin (@h0mec4fe), Daren Teo (@thepantryboy), Alderic Teo (@aldericc)
- Entertainment: Zaki Hussain (@zakiv4), Dharni Ng (@dharnimusic), Jeremy Tan (@jeremytanmagic)
- Beauty & Fashion: Nicole Chin (@chinchilla.vintage), Clara Li (@clara.slays), Kristian Lenardt (@kristianlenardt)
- Lifestyle: Joie Tan (@joiebaoz), Ian Jeevan (@ianjeevan), Natalie Naploes (@naploes)
- Popular Video of the Year:
- An engineer’s first trip to USS turns into an unforgettable side-quest by Imran Shamer (@aimrun)
- POV: Your 73-year old Ibu is stronger than most people by Siti Maryam Abdul Rahman and her mother, Cik Rose (@santaipantai)
- Emotional farewell – Aunty and Makcik neighbours for 23 years by Gina Khazali, featuring neighbours Siti and Lee (@gina_khazali)
- TikTok LIVE: May Suhan (@meivysu555), Wu Zhangju (@linxi.888), Alethea Goh (@bampipi)
- TikTok Shop: Nicole Chow (@nicolechowww), Fredy Chia (@fredyjays), Andreas Loh (@thelohbros)
The audience sizes vary enormously. We checked public pages on 20 October 2026:
- Ian Thio had 873.9K followers and 109.3M likes for his humour, dance and trend clips and the family videos with his grandmother.
- Melvin Ong, who makes beauty shopping guides, had 10.4K followers and 456.7K likes.
These counts come from a single day and will have changed by the time you read this.
That gap matters because a public vote doesn’t weigh followers. A creator with a small, loyal community can rally harder than a bigger account with a casual audience.
That makes the Rising Creator race one of the more interesting ones to follow. Melvin Ong is up against Ashley Kiara (496.7K followers, DJ and music clips) and Dylan Chia (77.6K followers, sticker design and the progress of his own art business). If you want your votes to make the biggest difference, a close category like this is a good place to spend them.
First, With an Asterisk
TikTok calls this the first awards of its kind for the region, but that claim is narrower than it sounds. TikTok has held country-level awards in Southeast Asia for years:
- Philippines: first TikTok Awards in July 2021
- Malaysia: August 2023, at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre (MITEC) in Kuala Lumpur
- Vietnam: November 2023
- Thailand: the 2024 edition was its third year
- Indonesia: the ceremony on 13 December 2024 was its fourth edition
TikTok also launched the TikTok Ad Awards in Southeast Asia in March 2024, though those honour advertising rather than creators.
By TikTok’s own description, the new part in 2026 is the format. It’s one creator programme for the whole region, with nominees from each country feeding into a single regional ceremony in Bali, Indonesia. For Singapore creators, that means sharing a stage with peers from much bigger markets, and that’s the part of this story worth paying attention to.
Where to Start Scrolling
Every nominee has earned their spot. If you only have ten minutes before voting, though, start with the Popular Video of the Year category. The three entries are an engineer’s first trip to Universal Studios Singapore, a 73-year-old’s deadlift and a farewell between neighbours of 23 years.
Imran Shamer’s video follows him taking Sentosa worker Dharma to Universal Studios Singapore (USS), a story AsiaOne reported on 27 August 2026. It’s a small act of generosity that became one of the year’s warmer local moments online.
Cik Rose’s real name is Rosemina Hamzah. She’s 73, and she trains with her daughter Siti Maryam, who is a personal trainer. AsiaOne reported on 15 August 2026 that she deadlifted 67.5kg, a weight plenty of people half her age would struggle to lift from the floor.
Gina Khazali’s entry is about two neighbours, Siti and Lee, parting after 23 years side by side. It completes a category that reads like a portrait of HDB life. That is the strongest case for regional awards: they put very Singaporean stories in front of a Southeast Asian audience.
Outside that category, try the Education shortlist, especially if you think TikTok is all dance trends:
- Kong Man Jing (208.7K followers) makes science and nature explainers.
- Dhev (128.1K) records Singapore history.
- Pedro Shiu (14K) teaches wildlife and animal care.
These are videos you leave having learned something.
What Four Nominees Told Us
We sent the Singapore nominees three questions about what the nomination means, how they stay fair to their audience and what it takes to live off this work. Four had answered in writing by 22 October.
Melvin Ong, who is up for Rising Creator, had been laid off from a finance role in 2024. “Honestly, it feels like a quiet validation,” he wrote. On brand deals: “I only say yes to products I’d actually use, and I turn down partnerships that don’t fit.” On the job itself: “It’s a real business, not just free products and pretty trips.” He added that “income can swing from month to month.”
Alderic Teo, who is nominated in Food, wrote: “I’ve never been one to seek accolades.” He hopes viewers will “feel a little proud when they say, ‘Yeah, I watch his videos.'” On making a living: “passion doesn’t necessarily pay well in Singapore, certainly not in F&B.” His ask: “Support your favourite creators while they’re still around.”
Daren Teo, who makes The Pantry Boy cooking videos and is also nominated in Food, wrote: “Most of the time I work alone, so it’s easy to wonder whether anyone is actually learning to cook from what I make.” The nomination, and the messages that came with it, answered that, he said. Viewers ask him most for “easy recipes they can pull off on a weeknight, and beginner dishes they won’t mess up”, which led him to start 100 Recipes to Get You Cooking, where each episode teaches one skill. What viewers don’t always see, he wrote, is “the work behind a 60-second video: the planning, shopping, testing, filming and editing, often a full day.”
Ng Jia Xin, also in Food, is a second-year university student who makes food art. She said simple pieces such as latte art take about 30 to 40 minutes of filming, while custom cakes and bakes take two to three hours. A brand deal takes about three hours of filming and an hour of editing, plus time on concepts and mock-ups. “The income is definitely worth it,” she wrote, because she works from home. She noted that “many of my brand deals/audience come from overseas” and that “the local market is relatively small and many opportunities depend on working with international brands.”
These are three nominees describing their own work, not income data. Each points to uneven pay and a reliance on brand deals, which is the context for reading the figures below.
What the Published Money Numbers Say
TikTok’s framing leans hard on livelihoods. Angga Anugrah Putra, TikTok’s General Manager of Content Operations for Southeast Asia, said: “This year’s TikTok Awards Country Nominees have turned their creativity and passion into opportunities to build diverse communities, sustainable livelihoods, and scalable businesses.” That’s TikTok’s claim about its own nominees, and the published numbers can only partly test it.
The largest regional figures come from e-Conomy SEA 2025, a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company released on 11 November 2025. It projects that video commerce (shopping inside videos and livestreams) will make up about 25% of Southeast Asia’s e-commerce sales in 2025, after growing five-fold over three years. The report’s launch post gives those numbers.
Keep two things in mind when reading them:
- They measure goods sold, known as gross merchandise value (GMV). They say nothing about what creators are paid.
- Google, one of the report’s co-publishers, runs a video platform of its own.
The Singapore country report gets more local. Citing data firm Cube on page 7, it finds:
- About 80,000 video-commerce sellers and stores in Singapore, up 125% year on year
- About 45 million transactions, up 30%
- Fashion and accessories make up 22% of Singapore’s video-commerce GMV
One figure tempers the excitement: the top ten sellers in each category drive about 50% of transactions. Sellers and stores aren’t the same as individual creators, but the pattern is clear enough. A busy marketplace can still send about half of its transactions to a handful of sellers at the top.
The closest thing to a survey of creator income comes from Malaysia. TikTok and consultancy Kearney released the Malaysia Socioeconomic Impact Report 2025 on 10 March 2026. The announcement says nearly 35% of surveyed creators identified as full-time. It adds that 45% reported revenue above Malaysia’s minimum wage. That’s revenue before costs, not take-home pay.
The same report credits creators, sellers and businesses with about RM20 billion in gross value added and about 147,000 jobs. It also says 97% of surveyed businesses saw TikTok as an important revenue source.
Read those figures with care. It’s TikTok’s own report, it’s about Malaysia, and the release doesn’t say how many people were surveyed or how they were chosen. It can’t stand in for Singapore.
For contrast, the clearest pay figure we’ve reported for a Singapore TikTok role came from an institution, not the platform. The National Gallery Singapore’s TikTok residency offered S$3,000 a month for a fixed four-month stint.
What Awards Have Shown Elsewhere
TikTok’s awards have run long enough in other regions to offer some clues:
- The UK and Ireland awards on 3 December 2024 reported nearly three million votes.
- At the US awards on 19 December 2025, TikTok announced a US$50,000 donation to Feeding America in honour of Creator of the Year Keith Lee.
Those are real signs of attention and goodwill. What none of the coverage showed was a winner’s income or contracts rising because of a trophy.
Awards bring visibility and recognition, but they tend to go to creators who are already successful, which is how those creators get nominated in the first place. So an award can’t, on its own, show that the platform creates careers.
A Vote Count Is a Fan Count
That’s no knock on anyone involved. It’s simply how the format works. This is a platform-run, public-vote award where each user gets at least 15 votes a day and can put several on the same nominee. The results measure how well a creator’s fans mobilise inside TikTok.
That makes the awards a celebration of community, and a fun one. They aren’t an independent ranking of who earns the most or whose career is most secure. Knowing the difference can make voting more enjoyable.
The Rules Behind Sponsored Posts
If you’re a creator yourself, or you’re wondering how to read a nominee’s next brand collab, Singapore’s rules are clear on the basics.
- Ads must be labelled. Section 3.5 of the Advertising Standards Authority of Singapore’s (ASAS) Guidelines for Interactive Marketing Communication & Social Media requires paid endorsements to be disclosed clearly and early. That way, viewers know a post is an ad before they’re persuaded by it.
- Freebies can be taxable. The Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) said on 25 October 2024 that influencers must declare both monetary and non-monetary benefits, with concessions for some low-value, one-off items. Free products can count as more than a nice perk. If you’re unsure how this applies to you, check IRAS’s guidance directly.
Whoever you pick, whether it’s a 73-year-old deadlifter, a history explainer or a sticker artist building a business one post at a time, your votes are a way of saying these stories deserve a bigger room. Voting is done by tapping the Vote buttons in the app before 11.59pm on 26 October. Head to TikTok’s announcement of the TikTok Awards Southeast Asia for the in-app voting link, then check back on 5 November to see who’s flying Singapore’s flag in Bali!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Daren Teo and TikTok.
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