Taxation on Internet Celebrity’s Incomes

Thanks to the growth of self-media, more and more people choose to become an Internet celebrity as their career. Moreover, even professionals work as slashies on YouTube to gain extra profits apart from their original job. Some of them set up a studio and others are micro influencers to operate, so the types of income become much complicated than ever.

It is important to understand clearly of the types of incomes, which might be applicable to the withholding tax rate. For example, if the incomes are counted as royalties, the amount of tax exemption is TWD180,000 every year. For incomes from professional practice, like performers, it is applicable to the norms issued by Ministry of Finance to proceed taxation.

According to the research, the common incomes can be divided into 3 categories, including “Advertisements benefits-sharing”, “Subscription”, “Merchandise Sales”, “Activities Notices”, “Bonuses from clicking the advertisement link”, “Advertorial”, “Salary payment by platforms and live tips”, “E-commerce shopping guide and live delivery”.

Platform advertising profit sharing and paid subscriptions are preliminarily considered to be listed as royalties; online celebrities sell peripheral products, which are preliminarily determined to be regarded as profit-making income; if they attend announcement activities, it may be salary income or other income, based on It depends on whether the manufacturer leads or is freely played by the Internet celebrity; if the Internet celebrity advertising link click bonus income, it should be classified as other income.

The advertising industry distribution may be classified as salary income or other income. If the manufacturer is highly dominant, it should be salary income in principle. If the Internet celebrity has a high degree of autonomy, it may be classified as manuscript fees or other income.

In addition, for platform salary and live broadcast rewards, the former may belong to other income or professional income, while the latter may be classified as other income; finally, for e-commerce shopping guides and live broadcast delivery, it may be other income or professional income, but if it brings If the goods are only responsible for selling labor services, it may be salary income.

To sum up, the eight types of activities are organized as follows:

Note 1: According to Article 8-5 at “Implementing Regulations of the Taiwan Income Tax Law”, the “royalties” refers to the income from the author’s authorship or translation of manuscripts, which are sold to others for publication or self-published or published in newspapers and magazines.

Kaizen will continue to pay attention to the follow-up question and answer set released by the Taiwan National Taxation Bureau and will release the latest news if any.