A Media Buying Team Lost $29K on TikTok in 2 Months: The Owner's Post-Mortem, Fact-Checked

"I took a TikTok team into Magic. A new source for us; I ran it myself back in 2019." On August 18, 2026, the owner of a gambling media buying company posted how that ended: 2 months, 7+ countries, -$29K at -33% ROI, and a list of what went wrong.

This is our review of the post for team owners and media buyers who are adding a new traffic source: the owner's account in translation, our math on the 3 numbers he gives, the context he leaves out, and what the post doesn't show. It's an anti-case, so the score rates how honestly and in detail the loss is analyzed. Editorial fact-check: 2/5.

Short version: the loss is admitted plainly, and the process diagnosis is the kind every team should read. But the post is text only, with no proof, no breakdown of what the $29K was spent on, no vertical, no offers and not 1 lesson specific to TikTok.

Who wrote it

The author is Hennadii Podlipskyi, owner of Magic Team, a gambling media buying company. By his own story in the channel, he ran Instagram pages in 2014-15, moved into gambling at the end of 2019, joined DEVILS, the holding behind a $100K team investment case we reviewed earlier, in 2020, became a team lead in 2023, and started Magic as a spin-off in May 2026. His Telegram channel, about 2,150 subscribers, was created in May. The post is in Ukrainian; every quote below is our translation.

The channel sells no course. It recruits: posts hiring buyers and whole teams for Facebook, in-app, TikTok and Google app campaigns, including people "from other verticals" to retrain into gambling.

Our take: an owner who publishes a 5-figure loss earns credibility. He also writes for the people he wants to hire, and the post's lessons double as a description of Magic's own discipline. Keep both in mind.

The setup: an outside team with a winter record

"3 buyers, 1 team lead... The guys aren't beginners, in winter they made up to $300K revenue from TikTok at 70% ROI, the info is proven." They started in May.

Our math: $300K of revenue at 70% ROI means about $176K spent and $124K profit over the winter. That's the record that got them in. The post says it was "proven" and doesn't show how.

2 months: "things are great, Malaysia caught"

The owner's account of what happened: "the guys almost every time said 'things are great, Malaysia caught on, scaling.' And so it was Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Turkey, Germany, Korea and other GEOs." The results: "our May closed at -$13K." Then: "The second month closed at -$16K and we stopped there." "TOTAL: -$29K at -33% ROI. Yes, a lot..."

Our math:

• $13K + $16K = $29K;
• if ROI is profit over spend, -33% means about $88K spent and about $59K returned over 2 months, roughly $44K of spend a month;
• per buyer, about $4,800 lost a month;
• month 2 lost 23% more than month 1.

Not shown: whether the $29K is only revenue minus ad spend or includes salaries, agency fees, accounts and tools. The owner gives the result in ROI form, which suggests ad spend only. A team's real cost would be higher.

What went wrong, in the owner's words

This is the useful part of the post:

1. "Tables for the ad campaigns (revenue, spend, install price, ROI, profit) weren't kept. Although they were issued to the team."
2. "Creatives weren't written into the UTM, so there are no stats per creative."
3. "The time zone of the tracker and the ad accounts was constantly different and wasn't brought to one."
4. "1 buyer had different GEOs, approaches and funnels running in parallel."

His lessons: "strict limits at the start. No 100 GEOs." "Fire without dragging it out if there are 2 or more red flags (there were more here)." "Without correct analytics and clear stats nothing good will happen." "Believe people less and don't extend the test if there's no improvement." And: "We parted with the guys normally, I wish them only success."

Our take: every item on the list is real and costly. A tracker and an ad account in different time zones mean every day's ROI is wrong at the edges, and on a $44K month that's enough to scale the wrong campaign. No creative tag in the UTM parameters means no way to know which video paid. 7+ countries for 3 buyers means every test is too small to read. These are basic, and the post's honesty about them is its value.

The list also blames the buyers for all of it. The owner says he gave them one-to-ones, breakdowns and the company's funnels; what he doesn't say is why 2 months and $88K of spend passed before anyone enforced the tables he'd issued. A team that doesn't fill in its tables in week 1 is a management problem in week 2.

The context the post leaves out

The vertical. The post never says what the team promoted. Magic is a gambling team, and the metrics the owner lists, installs, revenue and ROI, fit gambling apps. We read it as gambling; the post doesn't confirm it.

TikTok's rules. TikTok allows gambling ads only in specified markets where gambling is legal, after certification with license documents, and never to minors. Running gambling offers across Malaysia, Turkey, Korea and 4 more countries at once is hard to square with that, and the owner hints at the friction: TikTok was squeezing moderation hard. The post doesn't say how the team ran, or what share of the loss came from bans.

The rest of the company. The same month the TikTok group lost $13K, the owner posted a company-wide May ROI of 48% and called May "the team's all-time high." In July he posted 51.73%. So the loss was a failed new source inside a profitable company, not a company in trouble.

A week after the post, he asked in the channel: "What about bans, guys? Who still has live accounts?" It isn't explained.

Fact-check: what the author showed and what they hid

We rate every case on 10 points: what an outsider needs to judge the result and repeat it. For an anti-case the score rates how honestly and in detail the failure is taken apart. Like most case studies, this one is selectively true.

Score: 2/5. The post does the hardest part, admitting a $29K loss in public, and its process diagnosis is right. But it's a single text post: no proof, no breakdown of the money, no vertical, no offers, no TikTok mechanics, and a diagnosis that puts every failure on people who are no longer there to answer. Honest, short and unverifiable: a 2.