D’Aydrian Harding, 19, also known as @broisfunny on TikTok, has always been an outgoing person.
In high school, he won class clown and most likely to be famous. So, it’s not surprising to some how quickly he’s become TikTok famous.
Harding started making videos on TikTok earlier this year and he already has more than 1 million followers.
TikTok, a social media platform designed for making short videos has 800 million active users. The app has seen a significant increase in activity the last couple years and almost half its users are aged 16 to 24 years old. If you’re older than the TikTok demographic, you may be familiar with it because President Donald Trump has promised to ban the platform in America.
With 1.1 million followers, Harding has more followers than anyone else in the state of Kansas and is in the top 2% of TikTokers worldwide.
Harding’s videos receive anywhere between 100,000 to 4 million views. One of his most famous videos, with over 3 million views, shows Harding and a group of teenagers playing a version of spin the bottle. However in this version of the game, the person the bottle ends up pointing to gets to throw an egg at one of the others while they run away. The video showed the teenagers playing the game over and over again.
But Harding said his account following really blew up when he posted clips of himself and a friend freestyling with rapper DaBaby on stage at a concert in Park City. That’s when he saw his following reach 1 million.
After that, he continued making comedy videos and started creating story time videos where he would tell a sad or interesting story in separate parts so that viewers had to come back to his page to hear the rest of his story.
“The type of stories I make are different from everyone else’s,” Harding said. “I like camera angles and I want it to actually look good.” He said because of that, his videos take a long time to produce.
With Harding’s recent surge in followers, he has been making friends with other famous TikTokers, creating a group to travel, create content together and grow their followings.
Harding’s goal now is to continue to grow his fan base and transfer them from TikTok to YouTube. With Trump’s plan to ban the Chinese-owned company if it’s not purchased by an American company, that’s probably a good move.
“I just want to be different from everyone else, I want to stand out and I want to make my own path. I want to be able to always come back and say ‘yeah I did this from Wichita,’ ” Harding said.
So is Harding also a TikTok millionaire? There is money to be made in being a social media star with a huge following, with all of the platforms having different payment plans.
According to the British Broadcasting Corporation a TikTok “star” with 2 million followers can make between $25,000 to $35,000 per year. In addition to earnings from the platform, that includes money from promoting brands or wearing someone’s gear. For live streaming, TikTok has a system that allows users to buy “coins” and give “tips,” which can be turned into money.