Newsmaker

Achieving a major milestone, American teen sensation and dancer Charli D'Amelio has become the first creator to hit 100 million followers on the Chinese short-video making app TikTok. The 16-year-old hit the historic figure, just over a year and a half after joining the platform. Till date, only two other TikTok creators have reached 50 million folllowers. Meanwhile, Addison Rae is just behind her with 69.9 million followers.

As per a Verge report, these numbers make her more than twice as big as Will Smith, three times as big as The Rock, four times as big as Selena Gomez, and five times as big as Kylie Jenner and Ariana Grande.

"On YouTube, it took 14 years before any channel hit 100 million. D'Amelio only started posting to TikTok in May 2019, and the app has only been available since August 2018," according to the report.

Charli tweeted about her achievement and said she couldn't believe it was happening.

100 MILLION PEOPLE SUPPORTING ME!! I TRULY CANNOT BELIEVE THAT THIS IS REAL

— charli d'amelio (@charlidamelio) November 22, 2020

This time last year, she had only six million followers on TikTok and thereon her growth on TikTok has been insane. As per a Metro report, Charli has become well known for her popular dance videos on the app, as well as being a former member of the collective group The Hype House, which also features many other TikTok stars.

"It is precisely her ordinariness that is the key to her success. With her pretty girl-next-door vibe, she exemplifies the ideal package for a TikToker: Relatable, authentic, normatively attractive, youthful, fun, unthreatening and uncontroversial," Zoe Glatt, a digital anthropologist and critical intersectional feminist researcher at London School of Economics told CNET.

Notably, last week, she lost around a million followers in the wake of online backlash after posting a video of themselves gagging over a dinner prepared by their private chef. Despite that, she has reached the historic milestone on TikTok of 100 million followers.

TikTok that faced intense backlash from the Donald Trump administration has begun to offer payouts to creators, but creators have so far been disappointed with the returns.

The US government granted Chinese short-video making app TikTok a 15-day extension to reach a deal with American buyers, according to a federal court filing.

This means that the deadline for ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, to reach a deal with Oracle and Walmart has been extended from November 12 to November 27.