For school-age TikTok influencers, online fame can have real-world consequences

Jaydan Berry, an 18-year-old from Florida with 182,000 followers on TikTok, says her platform gave her “an adrenaline rush, but that didn’t help her in high school.” At school, she gets made fun of for her videos, like the times in class when people repeat her patented TikTok greeting (“hi guys!”). “I think (jealousy) plays a big role,” Jaydan says. “A lot of people in our generation… want to become famous on TikTok. So when someone is, it’s envy.

Jaydan shares stories about her journey as a Christian teenager or moments from a painful menstrual cycle on her TikTok page, which can be strange for her peers to know. “There are times when I wish I could experience high school like everyone else (without the TikTok fame),” she says. But there are also the benefits: the money she’s earned (she declines to be specific but says it’s enough to afford things like redoing her room, going on trips and getting her hair done) and the community that she cultivates.

Of course, younger influencers are also victims of online hate and may be particularly vulnerable to it. Tyjai Jackson, an 18-year-old with 75,000 followers on TikTok, says viewers are pointing out insecurities she’s never noticed before. “People are so judgmental about little things,” she says. “The way you talk, or your makeup, or the way you dress. It was just very overwhelming.

Jessi Gold, MD, psychiatrist and author of How do you feelsays she worries about how a teenager’s self-esteem can be affected by negative comments like those Tyjai receives. “You might end up wanting to change something about yourself and that’s a difficult stage of identity development,” Gold says of adolescence. “And that’s when you learn a lot about social development and how to make friends and interact with people.” This (could) be skewed if you have a large online presence, partly because the way you act as an interactive person online is different from the way you interact with people in real life.

The negative comments, however, did not deter Tyjai. She continues to build her audience, and that hustle has changed her high school schedule. “I was literally waking up at 4 a.m. every day just to do a few TikToks before leaving for school,” she says. “If you really want to be an influencer or something, you need consistency.”

The disconnect between what high school looked like in Peyton Mikolayek’s content and her actual experience was shocking. Peyton, an 18-year-old who is now a freshman at Johns Hopkins University, seems to have had the perfect high school experience if you look at her TikTok (as do her 500,000 followers). In videos with millions of views, she looks bright and bubbly as she paints her senior parking spot and prepares for prom. But the reality of his experience was far from the glossy videos. Take the video where she gets ready for prom – on TikTok it did well, racking up millions of views. But in her real life, this was sent to a group chat she was a part of and everyone made fun of her for the video.

“Being an influencer made my high school experience more difficult, but honestly, if I didn’t have that, I don’t know how I would have made it through high school,” she said. “I fictionalized everything to escape it.”

And, by the time she was a senior, she was getting paid as much as $7,000 for a single sponsored post.

Max Elk, senior talent manager at Grail Talent, says the amount of money high school students can make on TikTok is “pretty incredible.” Because they have something that these brands want. They have a platform with thousands, sometimes even millions of eyeballs.

According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary for a TikTok influencer is over $130,000, although other estimates vary. SocialBook (which puts the average annual income at $121,000) notes that income varies depending on the number of subscribers you have and can be earned in many ways. Some influencers strike lucrative brand deals, earning money from brands by posting about their products, while others exceed expectations on the TikTok store or through affiliate marketing. Influencers can also earn money through the TikTok Creator Fund, which offers payouts to creators who meet certain criteria. However, it’s unclear how much teen creators can earn, or whether it differs from adult creators.

Elk began working with TikTok teens in 2023 after noticing that brands were demanding creators who could appeal to a younger demographic. He’s found that younger creators are sometimes easier to work with than adults because they’re so used to being on their phones and creating content all the time; their turnover for content is faster than that of older creators. Although there is an ever-evolving conversation around the impact of social media on teens, Elk isn’t worried about the platforms his clients have cultivated. “From what I see, it doesn’t seem to affect them,” which he attributes in part to his view that so many teens are content creators that the level of fame is diffuse.