TikTok Marketers Are Underpaying Black Influencers While Pushing Black Lives Matter

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, Out of Love by the rapper Lil Tecca, with a new dance challenge. It was a hit, too, and McRae was excited a few weeks later when she saw Addison Rae Easterling repeating her dance. Easterling isn’t quite as famous as Megan Thee Stallion, though in the world of TikTok influencers she’s the queen: She has 70 million followers (to McRae’s 1.1 million) and has made, according to Forbes, millions of dollars off her dances and lip-sync videos, thanks to deals with brands that include American Eagle, Fashion Nova, and Reebok.

McRae is Black and Easterling is White, which seemed germane when she learned from her manager that Easterling had also been hired to perform McRae’s dance and was paid substantially more. Instead of the hundreds of dollars Universal gave McRae to create the dance, Easterling had been paid thousands by Lil Tecca for just her performance. The news burned. “I’m creating the art, I’m giving you the art, without me there would be no art,” McRae says. “But I don’t get the same respect, the same amount that these White creators get.”

The phenomenon of White artists appropriating the work of Black creators—and getting paid more to do it—is as old as the entertainment industry itself. But McRae’s experience cuts against the meritocratic promises of the likes of TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, which allow creators to achieve celebrity without going through agents or casting directors. Now that there’s real money to be made on these platforms—brand endorsements on social media account for $10 billion a year globally, according to SignalFire, a venture capital firm that tracks industry data—a new class of gatekeepers has emerged. They’re corporate marketers and digital ad agency executives trying to capitalize on the new Hollywood, and most of them are White. The result, according to interviews with dozens of influencers, is that White social media stars consistently make far more than their Black counterparts, even in cases where Black influencers have more followers or are doing more of the creative work. White choreographers with followings similar to McRae’s routinely make $5,000 to create and perform a dance. McRae generally gets one-tenth that, and she has noticed the same pay disparity across the industry. Although Easterling at least credited McRae, other white influencers often fail to do so.

In other cases, Black influencers aren’t paid at all. Stacy Thiru, who gives beauty tips to her 1.5 million TikTok followers, says that before she knew what her true market value was she’d regularly accept products—wigs, for instance—in lieu of cash when she created promotional tutorials for beauty companies. “They got free promo,” she says. “All I got was hair.”

Subscribe to our YouTube channel

Bloomberg Quicktake brings you live global news and original shows spanning business, technology, politics and culture. Make sense of the stories changing your business and your world.

To watch complete coverage on Bloomberg Quicktake 24/7, visit or watch on Apple TV, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, Fire TV and Android TV on the Bloomberg app.

Have a story to tell? Fill out this survey for a chance to have it featured on Bloomberg Quicktake

Connect with us on…

Breaking News on YouTube