The TikTok Saga Illustrates How Andy Grove Was Right: Only the Paranoid Survive

"Do you want to hear one more?
This one's a real knee-slapper."

The House of Representatives has approved a bill to cut off TikTok in the U.S. The bill, titled Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (H.R.7521), will be signed by President Joe Biden as soon as the Senate approves it. 

This brief blog post is not about the pros and cons of TikTok, nor is it aboutthe pros and cons of our government shutting it down. Rather, it is about a lesson I learned the hard way on Facebook a couple years ago.

At some point in time I was monetizing my blog with Google ads, and even though the revenue stream was mainly a trickle, there were monthly deposits made to my credit union account. It was daily habit to write, publish, then share on other social media, primarily Twitter and Facebook. Because I wrote frequently about the local arts scene, a large percentage of my readers came through the Facebook platform.

Suddenly, without explanation, I was unable to share my blog on Facebook. And since the Zuckerberg-founded enterprise also owns Instagram, my blog was also restricted there as well. 

The lesson is this: if you do not own the digital real estate where you have established your business, you're vulnerable to having everything you've built get dismantled.

This experience prompted me to see who are currently the biggest financial beneficiaries on TikTok. So I asked Google, which replied:

According to explodingtopics.com, the highest-paid TikTok influencers in 2024 are:

• Charli D'Amelio: Estimated earnings of $17.5 million
• Dixie D'Amelio: Estimated earnings of $10 million
• Addison Rae: Estimated earnings of $8.5 million
• Khaby Lame: Estimated earnings of $5 million
• Bella Poarch: Estimated earnings of $5 million
• Josh Richards: Estimated earnings of $5 million

I never heard of any of these people but superficial skim on Google shows that the top three are all young women. Addison Rae has 88 million followers.

If you wonder how they make their money, it varies. Once they have become established as influencers, they can get ad revenue or payment for promoting other companies. Some become a brand themselves and profit from selling their own products. And many profit by sharing their videos on other platforms.

Not everyone is making the big bucks the six names above are pulling in, but if Congress pulls the plug I'm guessing that a lot of these social media personalities will take a financial hit, as will many of the smaller fish swimming in this cyber-sea of social media enterprises.

According to Wikipedia the Senegal-born Khaby Lame has surpassed Addison Rae in number of followers and as of June 2022 had 142 million followers just by being an "everyman." You can read Khaby Lame's story here.  Or watch him do his comic antics here. 

142 million followers? Wowzer.

Lesson #2: When it's going good, don't take it for granted. Only the paranoid survive.

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