Saturday, January 08, 2022
TikTok's highest-paid celebrities collectively hauled in $55.5 million in 2021, a 200% increase from a year earlier.
Intro
Top-Earning TikTok-ers 2022: Charli And Dixie D’Amelio And Addison Rae Expand Fame—And Paydays
Movies, TV shows, clothing lines—a Madison Square Garden performance.
"Over the last year, the biggest TikTok stars’ earnings have surged, driven partly by their efforts to broaden their fame beyond the platform that first turned them into celebrities. This is certainly the case for the sisters atop our list of the highest-earning TikTok-ers, Charli and Dixie D’Amelio. Drawing plenty of comparisons to the Kardashian sisters, they now have their own Hulu series, The D’Amelio Show. It premiered in September and was renewed for another season two months later. Then, in December, Dixie performed at the Garden and nine other venues for the Jingle Ball concert series alongside Ed Sheeran and the Jonas Brothers. And together, the sisters have a lucrative brand, Social Tourist, a joint venture with Hollister sold at roughly 500 of the retailer’s stores. All this has helped push their earnings up to a combined $27.5 million, from less than $7 million a year earlier.
Meanwhile, Addison Rae has starred in one Netflix movie, He’s All That, and signed a new multifilm deal with the streamer. Josh Richards has also appeared in a Netflix movie, Under the Stadium Lights, and started his own production company, CrossCheck Studios, a joint venture with Mark Wahlberg’s production outfit.
Altogether, the highest-paid TikTok stars collectively earned $55.5 million in 2021, up 200% from the last time we counted up their paychecks, in 2020. And while they’ve focused their attention away from TikTok, they still earn much of their money—typically 30% to 50%–from sponsored content, where a corporation pays for a post advertising their goods on a star’s social media account. As TikTok has grown to over a billion users worldwide, businesses like Amazon, Louis Vuitton and McDonald’s have bought such ads. The TikTok stars can charge as much as a half million dollars for a single post, though most generally earn an average of between $100,000 to $250,00 per post, more than double the rates from that previous list in 2020.
The TikTok-ers understand the audience these advertisers want to reach because they themselves are about the same age. All of these top earners are under 25. Another universal truth about TikTok: There, stardom and money can come and go quickly, as evidenced by three newcomers to this list, Bella Poarch, Avani Gregg and Kris Collins.
No one is bigger than Charli, who has the app’s largest following (133 million subscribe to her videos) and a ballooning amount of business interests. She’s got the basics covered—advertising sponsorships from Invisalign, Morphe cosmetics and a newer one with Dunkin’ Donuts —and then considerably more. In early 2021, Hollister launched its joint venture with Charli and her sister Dixie, Social Tourist. (Teens seem to like the stuff. Fran Horowitz, the CEO of Hollister’s parent company, has pointed to Social Tourist as a major contributor to Hollister’s nearly 10% sales increase through September 2021.) Along with the Hulu series, Charli and Dixie debuted a show on Snap, too, in November. Charli vs. Dixie features 10 mini-TV episodes. In those, the pair compete over something—baking in one, board games in another—continuing to live even life’s simpler moments in front of a camera.
Dixie may be the older sister, but much of her fame and earnings, including the Hollister, Hulu and Snap deals, still intertwine with her more popular sister Charli. (Dixie has 57 million followers, Charli 133 million.) For some distance, Dixie has sought to carve out her own career as a pop singer, a deliberate effort to counter the squeaky-clean girls-next-door vibe powering the D’Amelio marketing machine. In 2021, she released two songs, “Psycho,” which featured rapper Rubi Rose and hit No. 25 on Billboard’s U.S. pop chart, and “F—kBoy,” borrowing a Gen Z term for a philandering young man . . .From home, she has given her fans access not only to her family life but her love life, too, plastering her Twitter with lovey-dovey exchanges between herself and her boyfriend Noah Beck, another high-profile TikTok star, who seems poised to become another sponsorship partner.
[...]
Methodology
We look at the top-earning stars whose fame originated first on TikTok. This leaves out other celebrities active on the app, like Will Smith and Jason DeRulo. From there, our numbers estimate what the TikTokers earned from January 1, 2021, through December 31, 2021. This is different from our debut list in 2020, which calculated earnings from July 2019 through July 2020. Another difference: That initial ranking was a snapshot of who we thought had earned a million dollars from TikTok during those 12 months. With sponsored content rates up, a million isn’t hard to do anymore, which is why this new Top 5 list requires a minimum of $4.75 million in earnings, a point several times greater than our original roll’s cutoff."
GET INTO IT ALL MORE : https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2022/01/07/top-earning-tiktokers-charli-dixie-damelio-addison-rae-bella-poarch-josh-richards/
FAIR & EQUAL TIME: Winkin' Blinken & No Nod...Response from Russian Foreign Ministry | Russia Today
History lessons work both ways --- "Indians of the North American continent, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Libyans, Syrians and many other unfortunate people who are unlucky enough to see these uninvited guests in their ‘home’ will have much to say about this,” it added."
Moscow hits back at Blinken’s 'Russians in your house' comments
"Russia’s Foreign Ministry has denounced remarks by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Moscow's involvement in Kazakhstan, telling Washington it would know better about arriving somewhere uninvited and overstaying its welcome.
Asked about ongoing protests and rioting across Kazakhstan during a Friday press briefing, Blinken argued the situation there is distinct from brewing tensions over another Russian neighbor, Ukraine, but claimed that Moscow might have ulterior motives in spearheading a joint security response to quell the violence.
“I think one lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave,” he said at the tail-end of the press conference, offering no elaboration.
The comment prompted a sharp response from Russia’s Foreign Ministry, which blasted Blinken for making light of “tragic events” unfolding in the ex-Soviet state, where initially peaceful demonstrations over a hike in fuel prices quickly escalated into deadly clashes with security forces, as well as arson, vandalism and looting.
Source: https://www.rt.com/russia/545422-russia-blinken-kazakhstan-lesson/
“I think one lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave,” he said at the tail-end of the press conference, offering no elaboration.
“Today US Secretary of State Antony Blinken joked about the tragic events in Kazakhstan in his typical boorish manner,” the ministry said, dismissing the statement as a “snide remark” while arguing that its peacekeeping effort under the regional Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) is “absolutely legitimate.”
Moscow ramped up the criticism further, also going on to cite a number of Washington’s invasions, interventions and military occupations over the decades, suggesting Blinken might learn a “history lesson” of his own.
When Americans are in your house, it can be difficult to stay alive, and not to be robbed or raped.
“Indians of the North American continent, Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Panamanians, Yugoslavs, Libyans, Syrians and many other unfortunate people who are unlucky enough to see these uninvited guests in their ‘home’ will have much to say about this,” it added.
Blinken mentioned Russia by name nearly 80 times during Friday’s press event, repeatedly accusing the country of “aggression” while warning of an imminent invasion of Ukraine. Moscow, which denies any such plans, has outlined some steps that could help reduce tensions in the region – including a commitment from NATO not to expand any further toward Russia’s borders. Blinken and the bloc have rejected that idea unequivocally, denying that Washington ever agreed to halt NATO’s growth, despite numerous assurances from previous US leaders that the alliance would not encroach “one inch eastward.”
Ransomware Attacks: Thousands of School Websites Worldwide Disrupted | Bleeping Computer
FinalSite ransomware attack shuts down thousands of school websites
"FinalSite, a leading school website services provider, has suffered a ransomware attack disrupting access to websites for thousands of schools worldwide.
FinalSite is a software as a service (SaaS) provider that offers website design, hosting, and content management solutions for K-12 school districts and universities. FinalSite claims to provide solutions for over 8,000 schools and universities across 115 different countries.
On Tuesday, school districts that hosted their websites with FinalSite found that they were no longer reachable or were displaying errors.
At the time, FinalSite did not disclose that they had suffered an attack but simply said that they were experiencing error and "performance issues" across various services, affecting mostly their Composer content management system.
"This impact may include, but is not limited to, Groups Manager, Constituent Manager, Login, Forms Manager (old), Registration Manager, Directory Elements, Athletics Manager, Calendar Manager," reads the FinalSite status page.
A school IT administrator told BleepingComputer that FinalSite did not provide them with a time frame as to when services would be restored and were forced to send emails to parents alerting them of the outage.
"Our website is currently down due to an issue that our service provider is experiencing. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you," read an example outage email shared with BleepingComputer.
In addition to the website outages, a system administrator shared on Reddit that the attack prevented schools from sending closure notifications due to weather or COVID-19.
"Many districts are complaining that they are unable to use their emergency notification system to warn their communities about closures due to weather or COVID-19 protocol," explained the Reddit post.
Outages caused by a ransomware attack
After three days of disruption, FinalSite confirmed today that a ransomware attack on their network is causing the outages.
"We are incredibly sorry for this prolonged outage and fully realize the stress it is causing your organizations. While we have made progress overnight to get all websites up and running, full restoration has taken us longer than anticipated," FinalSite apologized in a status update today.
"The Finalsite security team monitors our network systems 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On Tuesday, January 4, our team identified the presence of ransomware on certain systems in our environment."
"We immediately took steps to secure our systems and to contain the activity. We quickly launched an investigation into the event with the assistance of third-party forensic specialists, and began proactively taking certain systems offline."
However, in a template created by FinalSite that schools can send to parents, there is no mention of the ransomware attack, and just that FinalSite is experiencing a "disruption of certain computer systems on its network."
[...] Morgan Delack, the Director of Communications for FinalSite, told BleepingComputer that they proactively shut down their IT systems to prevent the spread of the attack, which led to approximately 5,000 school websites going offline. . .
While Delack could not share the name of the ransomware operation due to ongoing investigations, BleepingComputer was told that there is no evidence of data being compromised, and they are continuing to investigate with a third-party cybersecurity firm.
As most enterprise-targeting ransomware operations steal data before encrypting, we will likely learn in the future if data was accessed in a future update.
If you have first-hand information about this attack or other cyberattacks, you can confidentially contact us on Signal at +16469613731, Wire at @lawrenceabrams-bc, or Jabber at lawrence.abrams@anonym.im.
NOTE:
Education is a popular target
School districts and universities have become a popular target for ransomware operations over the years.
This is especially true for K-12 school districts with very limited funding and thus tend to have smaller support teams and less security infrastructure to detect imminent attacks.
"While school districts may not be flush with cash, the fact is that many carry cyber insurance and so can afford to pay demands - and that puts them in the crosshairs", Emsisoft threat analyst Brett Callow told BleepingComputer.
"Last year, 87 incidents disrupted learning at as many as 1,043 individual schools. In 2020, 84 incidents disrupted learning at 1,681 schools. The fact that the average size of the impacted districts has decreased could indicate a correlation between budget size and (in)security level."
"The bigger the district, the bigger the security budget and the better the security that's in place."
1/7/21: Added statement from FinalStite
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