Why Is Charli D’Amelio So Damn Famous?

by Claire Keenan 27 November 2020

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Charli D’Amelio just became the first ever person on TikTok to reach 100 million followers, which kind of makes her the most famous person in the world right now.

But what exactly is it about her that’s made her so damn popular?

Who Is Charli D’Amelio?

She reached her new milestone of 100 million followers after just over a year and a half on the platform.

Her copy of the Renegade dance became so popular that videos now tagged with the dance name have been viewed 2.2 billion times around the world.

But before this wild virality, Charli was living in Connecticut with her older sister and parents, where she went to school like a normal teenager and competed at dance competitions on weekends.

Then she started posting some simple dance videos on her TikTok account and completely blew up.

She now lives in LA, spends time at the famous TikTok Hype House, has a book deal, is a brand ambassador, and of course has built a following of 100 million fans.

How Did She Become So Famous On TikTok?

So, how did she actually do it?

Some people think that it was a combination of D’Amelio’s general appeal and timing that led her to become a viral meme.

She’s really good at making dance moves look simple, which made her the perfect poster girl for the short videos that TikTok was created for.

And because she was so consistent with posting, hashtags like #teamcharli started popping up which helped establish her as more of a growing trend.

She’s also just really pretty, which probably helped.

But her first video is nothing spectacular and there are comments under nearly all of her early posts like, ‘I don’t get why Charli is so popular’.

The TikTok Algorithms

There are other people who think that Tiktok’s extremely powerful algorithms are a more likely driver of Charli’s success.

Xeuyin Zha: “I think it would be unfair to say that algorithms doesn’t play a role at all, because tiktok is its algorithms and anybody who got famous on it should thank the algorithms.”

That’s Xeuyin Zha from the Australian National University.

TikTok is a discovery-based app, which means it uses its algorithms to curate recommendation videos for its users – literally under a For You page.

This system of algorithms is really clever because it captures both positive and passive feedback from users. It follows likes and dislikes but also stalks more subtle behaviours, like how long we hover over a video or let it loop.

This algorithm hints at what a user might want to see more of, and it is highly likely that a combination of all these things is what helped Charli first take off.

XZ: “TikTok’s way of sorting video and recommending video – I call it slightly more democratic in the way that everybody’s video has a chance of rising to the top of everything. I think it takes every new video that’s uploaded, sends it out to a smaller kind of, testing audience and sees how much of a percentage of people actually liked it. And if it passed the first round of testing then it get’s pushed to an even bigger crowd and eventually it rises up on top.”

TikTok themselves have said that even though a video is likely to receive more views if it comes from an account that has more followers, it doesn’t mean those creators are actually favoured over other less known ones.

But D’Amelio is so big now that she’s known outside of TikTok, so really if her following count fluctuates – which it did recently over silly family controversy – it affects her brand now more than anything else.