TikTok, the Chinese-owned app originally launched internationally in 2017 and merged with the popular short video app Musical.ly soon afterwards, was the most downloaded app globally in 2024. And in 2023. It’s the most downloaded app of all time, and yet until 2020, it was seen mostly as an app teenagers used to post dance videos.
Over the past few years, TikTok has emerged as a dominant force in both online and pop culture. It creates the most important viral trends and catapults rising stars across diverse fields such as dance, beauty, comedy, art, science, cooking, and fitness.
Despite current (and former) President Donald Trump's multiple attempts to ban TikTok in the U.S., the platform's immense popularity, particularly among younger voters, has made such actions politically sensitive. In fact, in 2025, President Trump paused the enforcement of a forced sale of TikTok, despite a law passed by Congress and a Supreme Court ruling upholding it.
On TikTok, virality isn't reserved for creators with massive followings. The platform's algorithm emphasizes content quality (meaning the viral potential) and engagement over follower count, allowing relatively unknown users to achieve widespread reach with just one single compelling video. By analyzing factors like watch time, user interactions, and content relevance, TikTok ensures that any video resonating with viewers has the potential to go viral, regardless of the creator's prior popularity.
This means also you could be the next TikTok star! Keep reading to learn how creators become viral on TikTok, what types of creators become viral and what potential paths this opens up to them.
1. Khaby Lame @khaby.lame (160M+ followers): Khaby Lame is a 25-year-old Senegalese-Italian guy who rose to fame doing comedy skits on TikTok. His first viral videos featured him responding to over-complicated “life-hack” videos by doing them in a simpler, more obvious way, along with his signature facial expression. There is never any dialogue or speech in his videos – a modern Mr Bean? He has had the largest number of followers on the platform since 2022.
2. Charli D’Amelio @charlidamelio (150M+ followers): She is a 20-year-old American who went viral with her dance videos, being the most-followed TikToker between 2020-2022. She was the first user to gain 100 million followers. She has since starred in her own reality show, published two books, launched a make-up line and a clothing line and is often described as TikTok’s biggest star.
3. MrBeast @mrbeast (110M+ followers): The 26-year-old American runs the most-subscribed YouTube channel, known for his challenge videos and for giving large sums of money to participants. He uses his TikTok to post shorter funny videos and sponsored content as well as to advertise his main YouTube and TV content.
4. Bella Poarch @bellapoarch (90M+ followers): The 28-year-old Filipino-American went viral in 2020 with a lip-syncing video that became the most-liked video on TikTok. She started out as a live-streamer and gamer, but posted more music content after going viral. Now, she is focusing on her career in music and using TikTok to promote her new singles.
5. Addison Rae @addisonre (80M+ followers): Addison Rae is a 24-year-old American who rose to fame on TikTok in 2019 with her dance videos. She started a podcast in 2020 and released her first single, launched her own cosmetics line and fragrance line and starred in a Netflix film in 2021. She now mostly posts content promoting her music and other business ventures.
As you can see, most of them have either established themselves relatively early or, in the case of MrBeast, on another platform. Khaby Lame is the only one who still uses TikTok for his main content creation and posts relatively regularly. Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch and Addison Rae have each followed similar career trajectories that have taken them mostly off TikTok, only using social media to keep up with their fans and promote their work in music, fashion or acting.
Arguably, it is much harder to reach that level of virality as a content creator in 2025. The market is becoming oversaturated, as everyone wants to become an influencer and TikTok is a relatively accessible way to do it, so being noticed at a level that would attract music or TV producers is difficult. Charli, Bella and Addison were all able to make themselves known on the platform before the platform itself blew up to where it is today.
What’s Popular
TikTok has a large and varied user-base and creator-base, where your interests can place you anywhere from BookTok to CookTok to just a feed full of cat videos. Let’s have a look at some of the most popular content categories.
1. Entertainment: This has always been the main thing anyone looks for when scrolling on social media. As a very broad category, it contains anything from humorous skits, pranks and reaction videos to silly animal videos. Khaby Lame and Mr Beast’s content fall under this category.
2. Dance: Dance routines to viral songs is what TikTok was originally most known for, and is still one of the top categories. Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae both originally went viral with their dance videos. (Lip syncing videos could be considered a subcategory of this, and is what made Bella Poarch viral.)
3. Beauty and fashion: This includes make-up tutorials, reviews, shopping hauls and outfit-of-the-day (OOTD) videos. The category is largely female-dominated and has a large potential for sponsorships and affiliate content.
4. Fitness: Inspirational content is big on TikTok, and the fitness category is one example of that. Accounts focused on teaching you how to do different exercises properly, offering work-out routines and other advice as well as just inspirational videos featuring before-and-after shots and motivational speeches can gain a lot of views.
5. Food and cooking: Similarly to the above, people love going on TikTok for inspiration on what to cook or bake next. Lots of viral food trends have come out of TikTok (baked feta cheese pasta, anyone?), and it’s a good way to find and save recipes.
6. DIY and home renovation: This is another inspirational content category that has recently blown up, as people love watching others turn their bedrooms or recently bought homes into something beautiful. A lot of step-by-step DIY tutorials go viral, as well as things like IKEA hacks and budget-friendly home improvement ideas.
7. Lifestyle: This fits anything from vlogs, storytime videos, advice and just aesthetically put-together video montages and slideshows depicting the user’s life. Some people go viral for having a more unique lifestyle, such as people living and travelling full-time in their vans or people living in self-sustaining rural homes (#cottagecore), while others go viral for showcasing their more relatable, normal lives in an aesthetic or humorous way.
How To Go Viral
TikTok’s format encourages users to engage with a very large amount of content in a relatively short period of time, with the algorithm making your feed perfectly tailored to keeping you hooked. It was the first big social media platform to have an infinitely scrollable feed that was based on video, rather than text or image posts (a format that every other major social media platform has since adopted).
In order to make a good TikTok video, you need to hook your viewers quickly, or they will keep scrolling. In order to create a loyal follower base, you need to curate your feed like you would any other social media platform. Having a certain category that you focus on and a certain aesthetic or style will keep people interested in seeing more of your content. If you scroll through Khaby Lame’s videos, he has a very distinctive style throughout his content – if you liked one video, you’re highly likely to like the rest.
One thing that comes up a lot when talking about the success of TikTok and its influencers is authenticity. Getting short, often unedited glimpses into a person’s life on a regular basis feels more authentic compared to highly curated Instagram posts and heavily edited YouTube videos. TikTok makes creating content relatively accessible, as all you really need is a smartphone, and it’s easy to find other relatable creators in your field to connect with. Compared to YouTube and Instagram, it’s also easier to go viral. The algorithm pushes newer content out to viewers on their For You page, and if audience engagement is high enough, it will continue being pushed into virality. The downside of this is that virality is harder to make use of – one viral video is not usually enough to become a star, but it will help you grow your audience gradually.
TikTok is also known for always having a lot of viral trends and challenges, which can boost a video into virality more easily. Same goes for using viral sounds, which is a feature relatively unique to TikTok – the audio clip you choose for the background of your video can determine how many and which people see it.
As TikTok videos are relatively short and users can easily scroll through hundreds of them in a day, it’s also important for creators to post consistently and frequently to remain relevant. Growing channels are recommended to post multiple times a week, with many even posting multiple times a day.
The Business of TikTok Fame
While it may be easier to become viral on TikTok, it’s not the easiest platform for making money. In order to be eligible for monetisation through their Creator Rewards Program, you need to have 10,000 followers with at least 100,000 video views in the last 30 days. After that, your videos can start earning money if they have 1,000 “qualified” views and are at least a minute long. There are also more specific rules for your account and your video to become qualified (only users in specific countries can join the monetization program, for example). Earnings vary depending on things like engagement and views, with creators reporting anything between $0.40 to $8 per 1,000 views.
Other ways of earning money directly through TikTok are live streaming, where viewers can directly send you gifts that are converted into payouts, and through the TikTok Shop, which is an e-commerce feature on the app. You can create your own shop linked to your account and sell products directly through your profile and your videos. There is also a subscription program, where followers can pay you each month for access to exclusive content.
Most influencers earn their money through sponsorships and brand deals. It is also common to branch out into other social media platforms and formats, as well as launch their own brands and products and use social media to promote them. This is also the best way to ensure career longevity, as social media platforms are always changing and relying heavily on any specific platform is not a good idea for building a stable career.
The Future of TikTok
In the US, TikTok has been under a de jure ban since January 2025. So far, the ban has not been enforced, as the US has granted extensions for TikTok to meet their demand, which is that ownership of TikTok should be sold to an American company. The official reason behind the ban is that Chinese ownership of the app is seen as a national security threat.
The US makes up a large part of TikTok’s active user base, and four out of the five most-followed users are American. American users claim that since the ban, the algorithm has changed for the worse, and there is less faith in TikTok’s longevity. However, there doesn’t seem to be any viable alternatives yet, either. TikTok has an important role in the current social media landscape as an accessible place to create and post short, relatively unedited video content directly from your phone and build an audience and community.
Social media influencer culture has only been around for the past 20 years or so, and has always been evolving along with the rapid changes in social media and internet culture in general. The 2010s were all about YouTubers and Instagram stars, while the 2020s have so far been about TikTokers. It’s likely that there will be more new platforms and genres of influencers in the future. As long as people are on social media, there will be ways to use social media to earn money and build a career.
Sources:
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-many-people-use-tiktok
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-many-people-use-instagram
https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/how-many-people-use-youtube
https://influencermarketinghub.com/how-much-does-tiktok-pay/
Official TikTok, Instagram, YouTube websites
