TikTok, as a leading short video platform, has attracted many users, and the resulting attention generates immense business value as a platform to diffuse knowledge. As a qualitative and explorative approach, this study reviews the knowledge payment industry and discusses the influential factors of users’ payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. By conducting in-depth interviews with ten participants and observing 95 knowledge providers’ videos, we find that TikTok has significant business potential in the knowledge payment industry. By using the ATLAS. ti software to code the data collected from these interviews, this study finds that demander characteristics (personal needs), product characteristics (product quality), provider characteristics (the key opinion leader effect), and platform characteristics (platform management) are the four core categories that influence users’ payment decisions regarding knowledge products on TikTok. A theoretical model consisting of the ten variables of emotional needs, professional needs, quality, price, helpfulness, value, charisma, user trust, service guarantee, and scarcity is proposed based on the grounded theory. The theoretical and practical implications of the study findings are also discussed.