Part of Morgan McGuire’s calculation as she’s deciding where to go to college is what will look good on TikTok. She wants to make sure the campus is pretty and that there are fun events like football games to document in bite-sized videos. It’s a factor she didn’t expect to consider as a high school senior, but now she has 750,000 followers to think about.
Welcome to the world of the high school TikTok influencer. Added to the regular concerns of a student — school deadlines, prom dates, college applications – are the worries that come with being TikTok famous — views, followers, and brand deals. Morgan, a senior in high school, first went viral the summer after her sophomore year of high school for a video about self-tanning her face. From that one-off post, she started studying her For You Page to try to replicate the success of other creators (only after blocking everyone she knew from her high school so they couldn’t watch her efforts to become an influencer, though). Two years after that first viral video, Morgan’s efforts have undoubtedly paid off — so far in 2024, she says she has already made $81,000 from a combination of brand deals and the TikTok Creator Fund. She’s been able to start and max out a retirement fund, she says, and she’s saving for college.
“I feel like I had to be delusional about it,” she says of becoming an influencer. “And then it happened, I guess.”
It’s not clear exactly how many teens have followed the same path as Morgan, amassing hundreds of thousands of fans — sometimes even millions — willing to watch them put on their makeup in the wee hours of the morning. But TikTok fame has become a viable path for a growing, if still relatively small, number of teens. The mega-famous D’Amelio sisters are perhaps the most well-known example, but teens have been flocking to content houses in Los Angeles for the last few years, cashing in on viral dances and other trends as their peers watch.
The fascination with teen content creators is, perhaps, because young people make up a large audience on the platform. According to Pew Research data from 2023, TikTok was the second most popular social media app among teens ages 13 to 17 (YouTube was the first), and one in five teens said they’re on TikTok “almost constantly.” And when they open the app, they can watch peers like Morgan, who are living the dream of being an influencer (a dream which 57% of Gen Zers share). A strange new reality is mirrored for them online, where famous teen creators record the daily moments of their life. But what is actually going on behind the camera?
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Fitting the demands of being a high schooler and a TikTok star into one day can be difficult. Morgan wakes up early to film get-ready-with-me posts before school starts and stays up late to plan her content and edit videos.
“I prioritize [that] over my sleep,” she says. “Which just negatively impacts the rest of my day the next day in school. But, I don’t know. I feel like doing my content… it just feels more important because I care about that more.” But school performance is far from the only way TikTok fame has affected her life. Morgan also suspects it’s had an impact on her social life. She doesn’t date anyone, she says, and her friends and mom assume it’s because boys don’t want to be involved with someone who has such a platform. “Because if we break up, then everyone will dislike them,” she explains. “I think they’re scared of that.”
Social media's impact on teenage mental health has been widely studied, and the results are concerning. Research has found that spending three hours a day on social media was linked to higher rates of mental health concerns and experts worry that TikTok’s algorithm in particular could be contributing to a mental health crisis for its teenage users (TikTok told CNN that one of its “most important commitments is supporting the safety and well-being of teens,” work that they continue to prioritize and evolve through various safety initiatives). But there’s little research on how TikTok fame can uniquely impact teens. In 2022, The Washington Post spoke to dozens of TikTokers, largely in their 20s and 30s, about the perils of viral fame. They described feeling “overwhelmed by dashed-off insults or mean-spirited critiques” in their comments. “The phrase people use is ‘getting on the wrong side of TikTok,’” Casey Fiesler, an associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder told the Washington Post. But what happens when the wrong side of TikTok is actually your peers at school?
Jaydan Berry, an 18-year-old from Florida who has 182,000 followers on TikTok, says her platform gave her “an adrenaline rush but it didn’t help high school-wise.” At school, she’s mocked and 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 be TikTok famous. So when someone is, it’s envy.”
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Jaydan shares stories about her journey as a Christian teenager or moments from a painful menstrual cycle on her TikTok page, which can be weird to have her peers know. “There are times when I wish I could experience high school how everyone else did [without TikTok fame],” she says. But then there are the perks: the money she’s made (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 she’s cultivated.
Of course, young influencers are also subjected to online hate, and are perhaps uniquely vulnerable to it. Tyjai Jackson, an 18-year-old who has 75,000 followers on TikTok, says viewers point out insecurities she has never noticed before. “People are so judgmental on little things,” she says. “The way you talk or do your makeup or the way you dress. It was just very overwhelming.”
Jessi Gold, MD, a psychiatrist and author of How Do You Feel, says she worries about how a teen’s self-esteem may be affected by negative comments like the ones Tyjai receives. “You might end up wanting to alter something about yourself and it’s a difficult identity development stage as it is,” Gold says of the teen years. “And that’s the time when you’re learning a lot about social development and how to make friends and interact with people. That [could] get skewed if you have a big online presence, in part because how you act as an interactive person online is different from how you interact with people in real life.”
The negative comments haven’t deterred Tyjai, though. She’s still growing her following, and the hustle to do so changed her schedule in high school. “I would literally wake up at 4:00 AM every single day just to make a couple of TikToks before I had to leave for school,” she says. “If you really want to be an influencer or whatever, it takes consistency.”
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The disconnect between what high school looked like in Peyton Mikolayek’s content versus her actual experience of it was jarring. Peyton, an 18-year-old who is now in her first year of college at Johns Hopkins University, looks like she had the perfect high school experience if you watch her TikTok (like her 500,000 followers do). In videos with millions of views, she is bright and bubbly as she paints her senior parking spot and gets ready for senior prom. But the reality of her experience was far from the shiny videos. Take the video where she gets ready for senior prom – on TikTok, it performed well, racking up millions of views. But in her real life, it was sent in a group chat she was part of and everyone made fun of her for the video.
“Being an influencer made my high school experience harder but honestly, if I didn’t have that, I don’t know how I would have made it through high school,” she said. “I romanticized it all to escape from it.”
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And, by the time she was a senior, she was getting paid up to $7,000 for a single sponsored post.
Max Elk, a senior talent manager from Grail Talent, says the amount of money high school kids can make on TikTok is “pretty incredible. Because they have something that these brands want. They have a platform with thousands or sometimes millions of eyeballs on it.”
According to ZipRecruiter, the average annual salary for a TikTok influencer is more than $130,000, though other estimates vary. SocialBook (which places average annual earnings at $121,000) notes that income varies on how many followers you have, and can be earned in numerous ways. Some influencers have lucrative brand deals, making money from brands for posting about their products, while others exceed on TikTok shop or through affiliate marketing. Influencers can also earn money from the TikTok Creator Fund, which offers payouts to creators who meet certain criteria. It’s not clear, however, how much teen creators stand to earn, and whether that differs from adult creators.
Elk started working with TikTok teens in 2023 after noticing brands were asking for creators who could appeal to a younger demographic. He has found that working with younger creators is sometimes easier than working with adults because they’re so used to being on their phones and creating content all the time; their turnover for content is faster than older creators. Though there is an evolving conversation around the impact of social media on teenagers, Elk doesn’t worry about the platforms his clients have cultivated. “It doesn’t seem to impact them from what I see,” which he attributes partly to his view that so many teenagers are content creators that the level of fame is diffuse.
As the average amount of time users spend on TikTok continues to increase and brands continue to look to creators with their finger on the pulse of youth trends, the number of teenage creators who are reaching virality can likely be expected to increase with it.
Peyton hears from a lot of younger people who want to know how she became a TikTok influencer. The question pops up in her comment section from wide-eyed teens who want to strike it big.
“Be aware of what you're getting yourself into,” Peyton advises. She wouldn't do things differently if she could, but she thinks other young people should be prepared for the intense criticism fame at any level can bring. “You need to prepare yourself for what people will say in person, because a lot of people think that you can just be anonymous and no one will ever find it. They probably will. You have to really develop a backbone in order to do that. It hardens you very quickly.”
