Former US President Donald Trump’s proposed ban on TikTok never happened. In fact, it’s known that TikTok’s 100 million American users contributed to a $35 billion annual revenue for TikTok’s owners, ByteDance Ltd.
But a new study by RAVEReviews now also tells us who is making the most money on TikTok. RaveReviews has, in fact, “identified” 62 of them who made a six-figure-plus income from the app in 2020.
TikTok’s highest earner is dance & choreographer star Michael Le, who is estimated to have made, hold your breath, US $20,378,000 from 92 ads in 2020. Michael also made the most ads (92), 30 more than the next most-frequent advertiser, Joe Albanese, who made 62 ads.
Here are the other findings:
- The TikToker with the most followers, Charli D’Amelio, is estimated to have earned $18,224,000 from 34 ads in 2020.
- The highest-earning fitness TikToker is Demi Bagby, who made $3,266,500 from 47 ads in 2020.
- Abby Roberts made $1,736,500 from ads in 2020, making her the highest-earning beauty & style TikToker.
Methodology deployed by RAVE Reviews:
RAVE said it had researched the 50 most followed TikTok accounts & the most followed for each key TikTok category using Online resources like Social Tracker & Influencer Marketing Hub.
Next, it scraped all the videos each TikToker published in 2020 & extracted the hashtags & mention tags from those videos. RAVE then labelled all tags as commercial or non-commercial (for example, #ad is a commercial tag) & calculated the number of ads per TikToker in 2020.
Following the Guardian’s estimation that TikTok stars could be paid up to $0.005 per follower for sponsored posts, RAVE then calculated how much each TikToker could charge for one commercial video & finally calculated total earnings by multiplying cost per post & total number of ads.
The data was collected in January 2021.
So, now we await a corroboration from TikTok itself on the results of this survey, but YouTubers & YouTube, are you listening?
Image credit: RAVEReviews
