Top Earning TikTok stars: Charli And Dixie D’Amelio And Addison Rae

Via TikTok @addisonre, @charlidamelio, and @dixiedamelio

Top-Earning TikTok-ers 2022: Charli And Dixie D’Amelio And Addison Rae Expand Fame—And Paydays.

The platform’s highest-paid celebrities collectively hauled in $55.5 million in 2021, a 200% increase from a year earlier.
M ovies, TV shows, clothing lines—a Madison Square Garden performance.

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Over the last year, the biggest TikTok stars’ earnings have surged, driven partly by their efforts to broaden their fame beyond the platform that first turned them into celebrities.

This is certainly the case for the sisters atop our list of the highest-earning TikTok-ers, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Drawing plenty of comparisons to the Kardashian sisters, they now have their own Hulu series, The D’Amelio Show. It premiered in September and was renewed for another season two months later. Then, in December, Dixie performed at the Garden and nine other venues for the Jingle Ball concert series alongside Ed Sheeran and the Jonas Brothers. And together, the sisters have a lucrative brand, Social Tourist, a joint venture with Hollister sold at roughly 500 of the retailer’s stores. All this has helped push their earnings up to a combined $27.5 million, from less than $7 million a year earlier.

Meanwhile, Addison Rae has starred in one Netflix movie, He’s All That, and signed a new multifilm deal with the streamer. Josh Richards has also appeared in a Netflix movie, Under the Stadium Lights, and started his own production company, CrossCheck Studios, a joint venture with Mark Wahlberg’s production outfit.

Altogether, the highest-paid TikTok stars collectively earned $55.5 million in 2021, up 200% from the last time we counted up their paychecks, in 2020. And while they’ve focused their attention away from TikTok, they still earn much of their money—typically 30% to 50%–from sponsored content, where a corporation pays for a post advertising their goods on a star’s social media account.

As TikTok has grown to over a billion users worldwide, businesses like Amazon, Louis Vuitton and McDonald’s have bought such ads. The TikTok stars can charge as much as a half million dollars for a single post, though most generally earn an average of between $100,000 to $250,00 per post, more than double the rates from that previous list in 2020.

The TikTok-ers understand the audience these advertisers want to reach because they themselves are about the same age. All of these top earners are under 25. Another universal truth about TikTok: There, stardom and money can come and go quickly, as evidenced by three newcomers to this list, Bella Poarch, Avani Gregg and Kris Collins.

No-one is bigger than Charli, who has the app’s largest following (133 million subscribe to her videos) and a ballooning amount of business interests. She’s got the basics covered—advertising sponsorships from Invisalign, Morphe cosmetics and a newer one with Dunkin’ Donuts —and then considerably more. In early 2021, Hollister launched its joint venture with Charli and her sister Dixie, Social Tourist. (Teens seem to like the stuff. Fran Horowitz, the CEO of Hollister’s parent company, has pointed to Social Tourist as a major contributor to Hollister’s nearly 10% sales increase through September 2021.) Along with the Hulu series, Charli and Dixie debuted a show on Snap, too, in November. Charli vs. Dixie features 10 mini-TV episodes. In those, the pair compete over something—baking in one, board games in another—continuing to live even life’s simpler moments in front of a camera.

Charli D’ Amelio
$17.5 M
133 M Followers

No one is bigger than Charli, who has the app’s largest following (133 million subscribe to her videos) and a ballooning amount of business interests. She’s got the basics covered—advertising sponsorships from Invisalign, Morphe cosmetics and a newer one with Dunkin’ Donuts —and then considerably more. In early 2021, Hollister launched its joint venture with Charli and her sister Dixie, Social Tourist. (Teens seem to like the stuff. Fran Horowitz, the CEO of Hollister’s parent company, has pointed to Social Tourist as a major contributor to Hollister’s nearly 10% sales increase through September 2021.) Along with the Hulu series, Charli and Dixie debuted a show on Snap, too, in November. Charli vs. Dixie features 10 mini-TV episodes. In those, the pair compete over something—baking in one, board games in another—continuing to live even life’s simpler moments in front of a camera.

2. Dixie D’ Amelio
$10 M
57 M Followers

Dixie may be the older sister, but much of her fame and earnings, including the Hollister, Hulu and Snap deals, still intertwine with her more popular sister Charli. (Dixie has 57 million followers, Charli 133 million.) For some distance, Dixie has sought to carve out her own career as a pop singer, a deliberate effort to counter the squeaky-clean girls-next-door vibe powering the D’Amelio marketing machine. In 2021, she released two songs, “Psycho,” which featured rapper Rubi Rose and hit No. 25 on Billboard’s U.S. pop chart, and “F—kBoy,” borrowing a Gen Z term for a philandering young man. At Christmastime, Dixie toured as part of the Jingle Ball concert series, hitting the stage in Dallas, Boston and Chicago. From home, she has given her fans access not only to her family life but her love life, too, plastering her Twitter with lovey-dovey exchanges between herself and her boyfriend Noah Beck, another high-profile TikTok star, who seems poised to become another sponsorship partner.

3. Addison Rae
$8.5 M
86 M Followers

The biggest thing in Rae Land this past year was her time on Netflix. She had a lead role in He’s All That, a part that couldn’t have required much research. In the movie, Rae plays a high schooler with a growing social media profile who makes over a nerdy guy in time for prom. (It is a remake of She’s All That, a Freddie Prinze Jr. flick plotted as complexly as a TikTok video.) When He’s All That debuted in August, it briefly ranked No. 1 on Netflix in 78 countries. A month later, Netflix announced a new deal with Rae for several more movies but didn’t disclose any other details. Away from Hollywood, Rae has a lucrative sponsorship with American Eagle, a top competitor to Hollister, the company backing the D’Amelios. And she has her Item Beauty line—a joint venture with makeup startup Madeby Collective—that sells its Lash Snack mascara and other products at stores like Sephora.

Also worth a mention. Bella Poarch $5M a year. Poarch’s standing has skyrocketed, making her now the third-most-followed person on the app (87 million people subscribe to her account)