Charli D'Amelio reaches 100 million followers on TikTok
Charli D'Amelio is the first TikTok creator to reach 100 million followers. She is also the first with some distance: only two other creators have achieved 50 million. On TikTok, that makes her more than twice the size of Will Smith, three times the size of The Rock, four times the size of Selena Gomez, and five times the size of Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande.
It also means that she reached 100 million subscribers in record time. On YouTube, it took 14 years for any channel to hit 100 million. D'Amelio only started posting to TikTok in May 2019, and the app has only been available (under her current brand, at least) since August 2018.
TikTok doesn't offer many opportunities for creators to make money
It's a huge milestone for both her and the app, but it also comes at a time when Charli, and her family, are increasingly trying to go beyond TikTok. The last few months have seen the launch of a podcast, further expansion on YouTube, the announcement of a book deal, and more.
Creators frequently branch out into other social networks and more traditional media formats once they have been successful on one platform. It allows them to expand their reach, speak to fans in more places, and provide a certain amount of insurance in the event that a platform makes a change that hurts their ability to thrive. YouTube creators, for example, have seen algorithm changes come and go that seem to prioritize and then downplay certain genres of video.
It also often has to do with your ability to earn money. TikTok has started offering payments to creators, but creators have been disappointed with the returns. The creators also don't have the ability to sell products directly from the app. That means the two main ways TikTok stars can make money are by recording native ads or by leaving the app to look elsewhere for opportunities.
The whole family has been expanding to different types of media
D'Amelio's team has been quick to create a media ecosystem around not just Charli, but the entire family. Charli's sister Dixie released a debut single in June that quickly made it onto Billboard's Emerging Artists chart. (To date, the music video for the song has more than 92 million views on YouTube alone.) The sisters have started a podcast together, and both have been experimenting with traditional YouTube formats ("My Slime Review," "I went sailing with Casey Neistat," "Tried these snacks for the first time") to build a following there as well. . Charli is also working on a book that will be released next month.
Heidi and Marc, her parents, have also started to build an audience. They each have their own TikTok, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and they appear prominently in the "D'Amelio Family" accounts on those same platforms. Perhaps the biggest sign of her success as her family is that when Triller signed an agreement for Charli to start posting on her platform, he brought the entire family with her.
This time last year, Charli had around 6 million followers on TikTok. In the year since then, both she and TikTok have experienced a meteoric rise, but TikTok has also faced a barrage of political concerns that have cast doubt on its future. It looks like TikTok will finally make it through, but if the platform starts to fail, Charli and her family have already secured plenty of other places to go.
