E6 Try Making a Living on TikTok If You're Not White

Marketers are underpaying Black social media influencers even as they push Black Lives Matter

- Sarah Frier

Since high school, Sydnee McRae had liked the idea of getting paid to make videos online. After graduating, she started making beauty tutorials on YouTube, but she managed to attract only 500 followers—not nearly enough to get brands to pay her for promoting their products or even to get the occasional freebie. Then, a year ago, McRae, now 22, had a breakthrough on TikTok, the short video platform.

It was just as Covid-19 lockdowns were beginning. McRae created and performed a dance to Captain Hook, Megan Thee Stallion’s sex-positive club banger. She encouraged others to try out the dance themselves with a hashtag, #captainhookchallenge, and a tutorial video that explained her dance step-by-step. The videos were popular, attracting more than 400,000 likes. Within weeks, many of the platform’s top stars—influencers with millions of followers— performed their versions of her choreography, helping the song soar in popularity, too. In April, Megan Thee Stallion herself joined in, posting a 15-second video from her kitchen.

McRae was in heaven. “I realized, wow, I created something that people love,” she says. She started gaining followers by the thousands. Soon musicians and record labels were getting in touch, asking her to promote their songs and offering to pay her around $500 per dance. McRae found a talent manager and quit her job as a sales manager at Massage Envy in Miami.

In May, McRae received $700 from Universal Music Group to promote a new song,