‘TikTok Famous.’ Kentuckians get millions of followers, national attention with videos.
Matt Nichols acts like any other 17-year-old — joking around as he videos himself at his Lexington home, breaking into a funny dance, running around his neighborhood or launching into a monologue about being a short high school student.
“I’m not short. I’m fun-sized,” he deadpans on one of the multiple videos he posts each day, then pretends to respond to his mother asking him to do a chore: “Take out the trash? I can’t, I’m not tall enough.”
The comedic seconds-long videos about the everyday life of a teenage boy might seem ordinary, but they are the result of research and a lot of calculated effort on Matt’s part. They have also won him a national audience on the wildly popular social media platform TikTok.
The TikTok app is a leading destination for short-form mobile video and a platform where, in a matter of months, several teens and adults from Kentucky and around the country have gained millions of followers and views.
Among those building a lucrative career on TikTok is Parker Pannell, a 16-year-old from Lexington who is pursuing an acting career in Los Angeles. He has 1. 4 million followers on TikTok, where he posts short comedic videos nearly every day. Just one video featuring people singing versions of a Lady Gaga song received 20 million views, his mother, Lexington real estate agent Whitney Pannell said.
“TikTok has been super beneficial to me with becoming an actor out here. It’s a platform where you are able to grow very quickly. For me, its been incredible,” Parker told the Herald-Leader.
Parker was a student at Lexington Christian Academy before moving to Los Angeles. There, he takes online academic courses every day. A family friend is his legal guardian, he has an agent and a manager, and his parents, who have lived with him for periods of time in Los Angeles, travel there to be with him at least once a month.
Parker said his initial plan was never to make videos, to be described as an “influencer” on TikTok. But Whitney Pannell said her son’s first TikTok video received 800,000 views, more than he had ever gotten on YouTube. Parker said he puts a lot of work into his TikTok videos, though his topics are typically light-hearted.
“His (TikTok) numbers started growing very fast,” she said. Companies are reaching out to him asking him to wear certain clothes or play a certain song in his TikTok videos and he is paid for the promotions.
“He’s doing pretty well, when he hit a million (followers) it was a game changer,” Whitney said. At that point, Parker was interviewed by Forbes.com and BusinessInsider.com
Now, “people come up and they want to get pictures and shoot TikTok videos with him,” Whitney Pannell said.
Nichols, a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School student who appeared in a TikTok video with Parker, is a star in his own right. He started gaining a national following in August 2019 almost as soon as he posted his first few videos on TikTok.
He said he watches for trends and puts his “personal twist” on them, so that high school students can relate.
“My main audience is mostly teenagers, kids in the 13 to 18 year old range. Usually its clean, innocent comedy of just .. things happening in high school,” said Matt, who has more than 800,000 followers.
Matt receives donations of money from people who watch his live streams and he has released a line of clothing and merchandise such as sweatshirts, hoodies and socks, “that actually made me some pretty good money.”
He is also using the TikTok platform to raise money for Dance Blue, a philanthropy at the University of Kentucky that includes a dance marathon. Matt wants to major in broadcast journalism at Western Kentucky University, so he said the success on TikTok “is right up my alley.”
One of Nichols’ friends, Barack Aziz, 19, who graduated from Tates Creek High School last year and lives in Lexington, said he started posting funny videos on TikTok about ten months ago and now has 1.1 million followers.
“A few of them went viral and ever since, I’ve had steady followers,” he said. He said he wants his videos to reflect the fact that he is from the Middle East so he talks about that. One TikTok video also focused on Tates Creek’s 2019 graduation ceremony.
Aziz is attending Bluegrass Community and Technical College and plans to transfer to the University of Kentucky, where he wants to study to become a physician.
For now, he sees his success on TikTok “as a side career.” Aziz said he makes money when music recording artists message him and ask him to use their songs on his videos. Some fans send him donations and other companies pay him to promote their brands.
Aziz said he recently signed with an agency. “Our plan is hopefully to become... big on many platforms, not just TikTok, “ he said.
Tiktok also has brought national attention to a Lexington high school.
A few weeks ago when Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear visited Lexington’s Frederick Douglass High School building, a video that had gone viral on TikTok showing kids at Douglass singing karaoke in the school cafeteria was creating an equal buzz among students and staff.
Yahoo.com took notice that the “video became extremely popular”, said Principal Lester Diaz. A student had shared a TikTok video of classmates engaging in a karaoke session that almost immediately received 870,000 page views and 1, 500 comments, said Diaz. The school, he said, allows karaoke on Friday’s during lunch as long as students meet certain behavior expectations from a school wide perspective.
Some adults in Kentucky have also experienced national attention from the platform.
Rolling Stone has written about how last year, Leanne Bailey, a mother of four who is 40 and who has a home bakery business in Hart County, spent an entire day making 100 cookies for a birthday party and was paid $300. But when she went on TikTok later that week with a video of cookie-decorating under the name “TheBaileyBakery,” she earned $1,000, the website said.
Bailey told the Herald-Leader that she’s been on TikTok since the summer of 2018 and has gotten “a great response” with 5 million followers. She has been working with a clothing company that pays her to make cookies featuring their logo. She also uses recording artists’ songs in her videos.
“I was really surprised at how fast my following grew,” she said.
Bailey’s agent Devain Doolaramani, a senior at Chapman University in Southern California, told the Herald-Leader he started working about a year ago with Bailey and Maddie Marcum of Maddie’s Cookie Co. in Lexington because they had a lot of potential. Since then, he said Bailey’s TikTok followers have grown from 1 million to 5 million and Marcum’s from 500,000 to 2 million. In the last few months, he said, his agency, called The Fuel Injector, also has begun to grow.
Doolaramani said his two Kentucky clients can earn anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000 a month.
How did a college student become an agent to budding TikTok celebrities?
Doolaramani said as TikTok started to gain popularity, “I basically saw the power and potential in the application.”
Oldham County Middle School teacher Craig Smith said his dancing video on TikTok in January received 1.6 million views and got attention from national television shows ranging from Good Morning America to the Kelly Clarkson Show. Articles appeared in media outlets that included The New York Post, which noted that Smith’s students call him “TikTok famous.”
He said an agency reached out to him, saying that the viral video had sold a handful of times. Smith said the proceeds have amounted to no more than $150. Smith told the Herald-Leader that he posts occasional videos not to get attention, but to connect with his students, to “meet them where they are.”
Where they are right now, along with much of young America, is watching videos on TikTok.
“They’ve just opened up to me more,” Smith said Wednesday. “It’s easier for me to talk to them. They are more willing to come and talk to me, to answer questions in class, to engage with me. It’s just opened up communication.”
This story was originally published February 17, 2020 at 10:37 AM.