TikTok celebrity Josh Richards, who took this portrait himself, knows his audience wants to know as ... [+]
At the end of March, Josh Richards found himself embroiled in a public feud with another popular TikTok star, Chase Hudson. It ignited when Richards released a YouTube music video called “Still Softish”—a diss track—that mocked Hudson and insinuated that Hudson had sent flirty messages to Richards’ girlfriend. The video went viral, and Richards and his crew continued discussing their beef with Hudson over Twitter and TikTok. It ended only when a mutual friend arranged a peace summit, and, naturally, that was also chronicled across social media.
This made for pretty good business, too. Richards recorded a total of four YouTube videos devoted to the fight, amassing close to 40 million views. Since influencers get a cut of the ad revenue brought in from their YouTube videos, Richards probably earned more than $100,000 from these vlogs. That wasn’t the only thing. Richards also released a new pair of joggers in his line of branded merchandise—merch in TikTok-speak—with “Still Softish” printed across the crotch. A link to order the pants appeared beneath the original YouTube video, and in the end, he sold thousands of the $45 pants and probably earned close to a half-million dollars in total from merch in the past year.
“I’ve really tried to use my platform to document my life,” says Richards. “I like to be very authentic with my fans.”
In many ways, Richards remarkably represents everything that has made TikTok a phenomenon, his videos showcasing what’re now the app’s most recognizable hallmarks: teenage antics, good looks, dancing, drama and the infinitely remixable memes. Richards has channeled this into 20.9 million followers and a spot on Forbes’ inaugural list of the app’s top-earning stars. Richards, who came in No. 5 on the ranking, made an estimated $1.5 million in the last year. The majority of the money came from a carefully plotted cycle, one clearly evident Richards’ dispute with Hudson: Build an audience, share intimate parts of life with them and then monetize. TikTokers commonly accomplish this latter part through merch, ad revenue and brand sponsorship deals, and Richards is no different.
[Read more: Is This the Real Reason Trump Why Wants to Ban TikTok?]
As TikTok’s popularity has grown, Richards has come to wonder what might lie beyond these revenue streams, a not unimportant consideration given TikTok’s unclear future. “Equity,” says Richards, newly determined to change his image as TikTok’s bad boy into something more resembling a thoughtful businessman. “I want to continue growing my entrepreneurial portfolio. It’s something that has really interested me for the last eight months.” Richards is the cofounder of TalentX, a talent management startup of other influencers, and recently announced that he was starting a beverage company, Ani Energy. In July, he took a role at Triller, a smaller TikTok rival, as the company’s chief strategy officer, a deal that compensated him in equity in the startup rather than a salary.
“Josh is wise beyond his years,” says Tinder cofounder Sean Rad. He and Richards are working on a nascent idea for a startup that they declined to share specifics about. “[I’m] excited to see him grow.”
A year ago, Richards was a teenager in a small town on Lake Ontario a short drive from Toronto. He first won fame in 2019 for viral TikToks that explained how to use the app, but he quickly switched to making even more popular videos of him singing, dancing and talking about his life. Richards studied which videos succeed best and found that they were ones that received a lot of user comments and were widely shared on the app. This encouraged him to respond to comments—stoking his fan base by directly interacting with it—and to post about things like his fight with Hudson to titillate and intrigue his followers: Content that’s “not so much G-rated. It’s a little more—well, I’d say, ‘edgy teen,’ ” Richards says. After his following on TikTok crested into the millions, he began getting deals with advertisers for sponsored content posts, and he earned several hundred thousand dollars last year as a spokesman for Crocs
Richards hired, then quickly fired a manager—the two disagreed on Richard’s preference for the more risqué content—and this eventually gave Richards the thought that maybe he and some friends would be better managers themselves than anyone else. TalentX was founded last December with Richards and four other cofounders all under the age of 30: Michael Gruen, Warren Lentz and Tal Fishman. Each had previous roles marketing or creating content on social media; Fishman is a popular figure on YouTube, where his Reaction Time channel has 15.3 million subscribers.
TalentX has since signed 105 clients, including Noah Beck, who has 10.8 million followers on TikTok and sponsorship deals with Bumble and Mattel
The TalentX founders also started their own TikTok collective, Sway House, with Richards as its most prominent member. Forming these types of groups is a popular trend among TikTokers, and nearly a dozen such cliques have sprung up in Los Angeles in the last year. Like the others, the Sway crew live together—at a swank 7,800 square-foot place in Bel Air—and help each other film and develop ideas for TikToks. Since they’re all teenagers (or in their early 20s at the oldest), there’s a social element to it too, and Sway has developed a reputation for being the party-hardy TikTok set. Two members were arrested in Texas in May on drug charges after leaving Covid-19 lockdown in California, and about a month later, Richards left the collective to take a break from the bacchanals.
The commotion at Sway and among other TikTokers has been prime fodder for Richards’ YouTube channel. His most popular videos is a series he calls “TeaTalk,” tea being slang for hot gossip. Much of it is about who is dating who among TikTok’s insular cache of celebrities, including Richards’ own relationships and, recently, his friend Bryce Hall’s with Addison Rae, one of TikTok’s most popular stars.
Generously put, “TeaTalk” is like watching a dorm room livestream, but it does constitute an important revenue source for Richards. Amid President Trump’s threat to ban TikTok, influencers are looking for new platforms on which they can develop audiences. YouTube has worked well so far for Richards, where he has posted 44 videos since February that have accumulated more than 200 million views. The result? Ad revenue brought in from YouTube accounted for a third of his estimated earnings.
With his energy drink company not launching its first lineup of black cherry and lemon line caffeine bombs until fall, Richards’ thoughts right now are most on Triller, the TikTok competitor that hired him as chief strategy officer. Triller is trying to position itself as the place where influencers can migrate to if TikTok gets shut down. As a creator himself, Richards knows Triller must offer influencers an easy path toward earning money for it to succeed. So his first priority, he says, will be rolling out a feature where influencers can solicit financial support while interacting with their fans on live video, a basic function that TikTok and other apps already have.
“He’s looking at the product and the content and saying, ‘Here’s what needs to be changed to make the product the best it can be,’” says Ryan Kavanaugh, the Hollywood mogul who bought Triller last year. “Why wouldn’t we take someone who has spent 24/7 of his life [creating content] and put him in the mix of making sure the product is everything he and his peers like?”
And just as The Weeknd recently performed an exclusive concert on TikTok, Richards is focused on similar opportunities for Triller. “Mike Tyson is going to do an exclusive fight on Triller,” he says. As always, he’s thinking about how to goose the opportunity as much as he can. “And I’m going to get go film with Mike, actually,” he says, “for a YouTube video.”
