Your Career Plan Is TikTok’s Business Model

A colleague of mine recently told me his daughter is thinking about skipping college to become a TikTok influencer.

I managed not to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

At least I think I managed not to say it.

I know. I know.

Old man yells at cloud.

Except this particular cloud has a recommendation algorithm, an advertising business, and an essentially unlimited supply of young people willing to work for free because one of them might become famous.

And the more I look at the economics of the influencer business, the more I think my Abe Simpson reaction might actually have a point.

Because, yes, you absolutely can make a fortune doing this.

Fortune recently profiled 21-year-old Logan Walter, who left college after building a following on TikTok and has reportedly made more than $1 million over two years selling beauty and lifestyle products through TikTok Shop and brand deals. He began posting at 15, during COVID, and already had around 100,000 followers when he started selling on TikTok Shop. (fortune.com)

Good for him.

Seriously.

This isn't about Logan Walter.

It's about that story.

Because imagine you're 19 years old and deciding whether to spend the next four years taking chemistry labs, writing papers, getting internships, and perhaps accumulating a depressing amount of student debt.

Or:

This Gen Zer dropped out of college to become an influencer—now he’s a millionaire.

That was literally the Fortune headline.

You don't need a marketing department for TikTok when Fortune will write the recruiting brochure for you.

And young people are getting the message. Morning Consult found that 57% of Gen Z respondents said they would definitely or probably consider becoming an influencer. Among people interested in doing it, the most commonly cited major reason was making money. (pro-assets.morningconsult.com)

Which is where I start yelling at the cloud again.

Because that isn't remotely what the income distribution actually looks like.

CreatorIQ surveyed more than 5,000 creators this year. Sixty-seven percent made less than $10,000 from content creation over the previous year. Fewer than 5% made more than $100,000. For 62%, creating content wasn't their primary source of income. (creatoriq.com)

Another CreatorIQ analysis found that the top 10% of creators collected 62% of the payments in 2025, up from 53% just two years earlier. The top 1% alone took 21%.

So, sure.

You could be Logan Walter.

You could also play in the NFL.

Where did everybody else go?

This is the first thing that makes the influencer economy so weird.

Failure is almost completely invisible.

If a restaurant fails, there's an empty restaurant.

If a company fails, people get laid off.

If a professional athlete doesn't make the league, eventually he sells insurance and tells stories about playing Division II football.

But what happens to the aspiring TikTok creator who posts 326 videos, peaks at 4,700 followers, earns $837, gets exhausted, and quits?

Nothing.

She just stops appearing in your feed.

The evidence of failure literally disappears from the product.

Meanwhile, the successful creator remains everywhere. The algorithm has already determined that people want to watch her, so it shows her to more people, which makes her more successful, which makes aspiring creators see yet another person who apparently cracked the code.

This produces absolutely magnificent survivorship bias.

Spend enough time on TikTok and the world begins to look like it is filled with 24-year-olds who film themselves putting on makeup twice a day and somehow own a Range Rover.

This is approximately as useful for career planning as hanging around the players' parking lot at an NBA arena.

This reeks of MLM economics

No, TikTok is not literally an MLM.

There is no downline. You don't have to recruit three friends who recruit three friends. There is genuine outside money coming into the system from advertisers, subscriptions, affiliate sales and commerce.

In fact, the creator advertising business itself isn't collapsing at all. The IAB says U.S. creator ad spending has gone from about $13.9 billion in 2021 to roughly $44 billion in 2026. (iab.com)

There's plenty of money.

It just isn't distributed remotely evenly.

And psychologically, the whole thing looks awfully familiar:

The spectacular winners are highly visible.

The failures disappear.

Everyone is told that persistence is the answer:

• Post more.
• Improve your hook.
• Find your niche.
• Be authentic.
• Build your personal brand.
• Engage with your community.GRIND.

And if it doesn't work?

Well, apparently you didn't grind correctly.

Meanwhile there is an entire secondary economy selling tools, coaching, courses, microphones, cameras, lights, editing software, analytics, agencies and “growth strategies” to people trying to become successful creators.

There is always another prospect coming through the front door.

That is the MLM part that bothers me.

The dream continually regenerates the labor supply.

And TikTok doesn't actually need you to succeed

This is the part I can't get out of my head.

TikTok's interests and the creator's interests aren't the same.

You want to build a durable career.

TikTok wants content.

Those are sometimes compatible goals, but they aren't the same goal.

Suppose you spend two years trying to make it.

• You buy the equipment.
• You write the scripts.
• You shoot the videos.
• You edit them.
• You upload them.
• You promote them.
• You answer comments.
• You learn what gets engagement.
• You probably make hundreds of pieces of content.

And after two years, you've made almost no money and finally decide that you are sick of this shit.

From your perspective, the experiment failed.

From TikTok's perspective?

You just supplied two years of inventory.

And when you leave, there is another 18-year-old walking through the door.

That's an extraordinary labor model when you stop and think about it.

• The platform doesn't have to hire the talent.
• It doesn't have to train the talent.
• It doesn't have to buy the production equipment.
• It doesn't have to pay for the failed productions.
• It doesn't have to provide health insurance.It doesn't have to provide retirement.
• It doesn't even particularly have to retain the workforce.

It just needs enough people to believe they could be the next one who breaks through.

The unsuccessful audition is itself part of the product.

Hollywood never figured out how to monetize everybody who didn't get the part.

TikTok did.

COVID poured gasoline on this thing

I've wondered for a while whether we are still living through the hangover from two very unusual economic events happening simultaneously.

COVID locked everybody inside with phones in their hands.

And ZIRP — effectively free money — flooded technology companies, startups, direct-to-consumer companies and digital advertising with capital.

I don't think the creator economy was created by COVID or zero interest rates. YouTube existed long before either.

But I strongly suspect 2020 and 2021 pulled years of growth forward.

People suddenly had enormous amounts of time to consume online content. Other people suddenly had enormous amounts of time to make it. Businesses desperately needed digital channels to reach customers. Venture-funded companies were throwing money at customer acquisition.

Walter's story almost perfectly captures the moment. He told Fortune he downloaded TikTok when the pandemic hit because he needed a creative outlet. Six years later, he's the kid in the magazine who became a millionaire. (fortune.com)

Again: good for him.

But millions of other teenagers downloaded TikTok for exactly the same reason.

We don't get Fortune profiles about them.

Even winning can go sideways remarkably fast

Then there is Haliey Welch.

You probably remember her as the “Hawk Tuah” woman, which remains one of the strangest sentences I've ever typed.

In June 2024, one funny answer during a street interview made her explosively famous.

Within months she had millions of followers and a podcast.

Then came a cryptocurrency bearing her brand.

The $HAWK memecoin launched in December 2024 and crashed within 24 hours. The resulting mess produced accusations, lawsuits involving others connected with the coin, an SEC investigation and massive public backlash. The SEC ultimately closed its investigation without making findings against Welch or imposing monetary penalties on her.

That part matters. I'm not accusing her of running a scam.

What interests me is what happened to the human being caught inside this machine.

In March of this year, Welch said the aftermath was so bad that she essentially wouldn't leave her house for months. She described receiving death threats and said she had been talked into participating in something she didn't understand. (people.com)

Think about the timeline.

All in about six months.

That's not a career arc, it's atmospheric reentry. And we all know what happens when you plunge through the atmosphere...

And it illustrates another danger of sudden influencer success: when your fame arrives before you have any real business experience, there are immediately dozens of people standing around explaining how you can monetize it.

Some of them may even know what they're doing.

You probably don't.

The Range Rover is content

This is where the professional-athlete comparison starts becoming useful.

A normal professional career usually gives you time to grow into your income.

You make $45,000.

Then $60,000.

Then $85,000.

Maybe eventually $150,000 or $250,000.

Ideally somewhere along that road you learn about taxes, retirement accounts, saving, insurance and the useful financial principle known as don't spend every fucking dollar you make.

A successful creator can go from living with Mom and Dad to making $40,000 a month astonishingly quickly. Like in weeks or months. Seriously.

And there is no reason to assume that somebody who has become very good at making TikToks has simultaneously become very good at managing a volatile small business.

Worse, conspicuous consumption can actually look like a business requirement.

• The expensive apartment?
  Content.
• The clothes?
  Content.
• The trip to Bali?
  Content.
• The new car?
  Content.

And because the audience has come to expect that lifestyle, cutting spending when revenue begins falling can itself become part of the problem. The outward appearance of success is part of the product.¹

Professional athletes at least know there is an expiration date.

Your knees eventually tell you.

Influencers may not know that March 2026 was the peak until sometime in 2028.

So, kid, make TikToks

This is the part where the old man yelling at the cloud has to concede something.

If my colleague's daughter wants to make TikToks?

Absolutely.

Hell, I'd encourage it.

• Learn video.
• Learn editing.
• Learn storytelling.
• Learn advertising.
• Learn analytics.
• Learn how audiences behave.
• Learn how to sell something.
• Build an audience.
• Try to make money.

Those are real skills. If she's genuinely good at it, she'll have evidence.

What I would not do is reverse the experiment.

Don't drop out of college so that you can find out whether you can become an influencer.

Become successful enough as an influencer that remaining in college becomes economically irrational.

Those are very different propositions.

If you're already making $150,000 a year, have a large engaged audience across multiple platforms, advertisers are calling you faster than you can service them, you've banked enough money to survive a bad year, and school is interfering with a functioning business?

Okay.

Now we have a conversation.

But quitting school because you've watched enough people become successful on TikTok to conclude that this is a sensible career plan?

Kid.

The casino is fucking delighted you've decided to pursue this professionally.

¹ - about a month ago, I started seeing inflencer crying porn on Youtube, influencers who were publishing videos about how bigger influencers were on the downslope (and yeah, that irony can be cut with a fucking fork) so I did some digging... Lots of grist for the video mill on this out there.