TIK TOK STARS TO FOLLOW TV

“The more platforms that come out and that have their own creator ecosystem, the more the creators that we just need to be aware of,” says Colin Hickey, Senior Vice President of Operations at VidCon. Rosenblum and his partner Samir Chaudry, whose channel offers aspiring creators content about well-performing creators, have added two full-time writers and a Slack channel with dozens of contributors who keep track of the various parts of the internet for their newsletter The Publish Press.įor the VidCon team, it has meant having more creators on their radar than ever before. “It's inevitable that it's less impactful just by the sheer number of creators since you've got your attention and the amount of eyeballs essentially split in half.”

“What it means to be a creator with a million followers means something very different than it used to four years ago,” says Gahan. This phenomenon has led to an oversaturation of successful creators coming from the TikTok platform, and simply too many creators for even the heaviest users of the app to be familiar with. “It makes the ‘For You Page’ the star of TikTok, oftentimes over the creators.” “If you get rid of some of the creators on TikTok they're going to be filled with more content because there's just an influx,” says Rosenblum. This is in part due to those platforms’ home page and algorithm formats tending to push already well-performing content, versus TikTok’s default FYP, which inundates users with newer content from creators they’ve never encountered, and often do not already follow. “Each piece of content has a chance to be seen and the best stuff can truly rise to the top.” That is different from other social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, where “historically the big get bigger with newcomers left to pick up the scraps,” says Gahan. “On TikTok, who you follow hardly matters at all because of the default FYP comprised of algorithmically selected content versus a prioritization on follower count,” says Gahan. Last year, TikToker Grace Africa, who has over 1 million followers, posted a TikTok in which she stood alone at a VidCon meet-and-greet, with not a single fan in sight.Īfrica’s experience may reflect a side effect of changes wrought by TikTok’s “‘For You Page' (FYP), the app’s homepage that is hyper-curated to each individual. But the arrival of TikTok creators has not been met with unanimous enthusiasm from attendees. That year, after a two-year pandemic hiatus during which the popularity of TikTok sharply increased, TikTok also sponsored the event for the first (and, to date, only) time. “Many creators have a dedicated following within their niche, but they remain anonymous to the wider world,” says Gahan, who sits on VidCon’s advisory board and has attended the conference since it began in 2010.īefore 2022, TikTokers weren’t even on the lineup for VidCon, whose roots are squarely in the world of YouTube given its founding by YouTube “VlogBrothers” Hank and John Green. This has created a “fascinating subculture of influence,” says Brendan Gahan, Chief Innovation Officer at creative agency Mekanism. That’s about 6,200 more than on YouTube and nearly 16,000 more than on Instagram.

In fact, more than 39,000 accounts on TikTok now have at least 1 million followers, according to data from social media analytics provider Social Blade. But the structure of TikTok’s app has also weighted virality like no other app before it-introducing more creators with high follower counts than ever before.

TIK TOK STARS TO FOLLOW TV

Yes, there are the Charli D’Amelios and Alix Earles of TikTok-a tier of creators that has transcended the app with ubiquitous mainstream opportunities like Super Bowl commercials, reality TV shows, and six-figure brand collaborations. That’s in large part because as the event has shifted to include more TikTokers than YouTubers, it’s had to face a new reality: the meaning of a follow on TikTok is not what it is, or once was-on YouTube or any other social platform. “I’m sure they have great content, I just haven’t come across it.”

“Sometimes there’s a TikToker that’s apparently really popular, but I don’t know who they are,” says Burriss. But when they attended the event in Anaheim, Calif., earlier this summer, that was far from the case. Back in the day, they used to know the vast majority of the creator lineup at the conference. YouTubers” who have amassed over 10 million subscribers since the platform’s early days, they’ve been attending VidCon, an annual convention for fans to connect with their favorite online personalities, for nearly a decade. Alex Burriss and Roi Fabito, known online as Alex and Roi Wassabi, have been making videos for 17 years.

Tik tok stars to follow