Young and Famous
University freshman, DouYin celebrity and dancing studio owner
"My biggest concern now is how to turn fame into wealth, " Jessica, a TikTok influencer with 500,000 followers, dance studio founder and first-year journalism student at Hong Kong Baptist University said.
Jessica's dance studio is located in a remote industrial area in Hong Kong
She started recording videos in 2018 when DouYin (the Chinese version of TikTok) was still on the rise. "At that time, DouYin was still attracting video bloggers to the site and the focus was relatively focused on dancing and custom show, and my followers rapidly grew during that time", Jessica said, "The identity of Hong Kong people might still bring traffic at that time, but it changed after 2019."
Since her follower growth has been a bit slow lately, Jessica checks her follower count regularly
Many bloggers believe that DouYin modified its video recommendation algorithm after the Hong Kong social movement, which had a huge impact on small and medium-sized bloggers like Jessica, who lives in Hong Kong. At the same time, as DouYin's active users quickly increased, more and more Multi-Channel Network (MCN) companies moved into DouYin and partnered with ByteDance (DouYin's parent company), constantly squeezing the survival space of small influencers.
Jessica receives numerous messages from fans every day asking her to record videos
In response to this trend, Jessica rented a dance studio near Kwai Hing district during the summer before entering university in 2021 and used her fame at DouYin to attract dancing students.
She completed the entire interior design of the studio herself, for which she spent about HK$20,000
It was not easy to recruit students during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, she still managed to keep the studio running. "Making videos and dancing are things I love and won't change because of outside impact. Now it's getting harder and harder to do short videos, but I'm also actively exploring other social platforms and trying to finish my studies at university, " Jessica said in her studio.
The building where Jessica's dance studio is located is close to the centre of the fifth wave of the outbreak in Hong Kong, and as a result there are far fewer people renting the studio