The Damelio Show
How the Damelio sisters are already setting themselves up for success at just 17 and 20 years old.
Imagine that at the end of a really successful year of work, you made upwards of $17.5 million dollars. Now, imagine you did that while you were just 17 years old, still in high school. This was what 2021 was like for Charli Damelio, a girl from Connecticut who blew up on the most popular social media app today, Tik Tok. Charli started posting dancing videos on her Tik Tok, @charlidamelio, when she was just 15 years old, recreating dances she’s seen other creators post. She started to get a lot of viewers quickly as she has a background in dance, so people noticed she was talented quickly. Before she knew it, she had over 130 million followers and 10.8 billion likes on the app. When she first started, she didn’t plan on trying to become famous, she was just posting as any other 15-year-old girl at the time was, having fun with friends. Now, she has multiple brand deals, a management team, a clothing line, and more projects going on behind the scenes. Charli’s sister Dixie is 21 years old today, and just starting out with her music career. While Dixie doesn’t have as large of a social media following as Charli, she does still have over 57 million followers as well as her own management team and collaborates on their joint clothing line available at Hollister. From their Tik Tok fame, they have been given so many new opportunities, including their new Hulu Original: The Damelio Show.
Every Episode of The Damelio Show features different aspects of the sisters’ lives, from Vogue videos to dance practice and planning out their Tik Toks that partner with various companies. Charli and Dixie have to engage in participatory culture when posting to Tik Tok, as the platform rewards those who are constantly uploading new content to their profiles. Tik Tok pushes content from creators who are engaging with others and inviting people to stay on the app longer, which is how Charli blew up so quickly. Constant posting as well as following trends, popular sounds, and staying up to date with everyday drama on Tik Tok is what helps creators become viral. This viral media reaches large audiences when it is pushed on the for-you page, which categorizes these popular videos together and suggests them to users. Viral media can also be credited to hashtags and hashtag activism, where people share opinions and stances using common phrases or tags to increase their content’s findability. Charli is a very open advocate for the #BlackLivesMatter movement, using the hashtag on lots of educational videos as well as making #BLM her profile picture for months on end. The sisters know they have a large impact on their audience, and use their platform and presence to help educate others and spread awareness on important topics; something a lot of creators get negative attention from as they don’t talk about these issues at all, instead avoiding the issues altogether.
Focusing back on The Damelio Show, we see details of both Charli and Dixie's personal lives and projects, which have a lot of similarities as well as contrast. Charli has a lot more brand deals from large companies like Dunkin and Sabra, while Dixie more-so collaborates on these brands with her sister, including their makeup line from Morphe and the clothing line Social Tourist. These cultural hierarchies between the sisters are astonishing, as both have insane opportunities, yet we see how many more Charli has because of her vast following on social media. These differences do have a lot to do with the follower counts on their pages, but also the fact that Dixie is more focused on her music career than being an influencer like Chalri. So while we see Charli in the limelight much more when it comes to paid partnerships and brand deals, that’s because that’s the industry Charli wants and aims to be successful in, while Dixie stays honed in on getting her first album released. Charli explains how if this whole ‘social media thing’ doesn’t work out, she has so much experience and knowledge in marketing that its a great fall-back plan, as she sees how it functions every day.
The Damelio Show does an amazing job at showcasing the insider perspective of social media and influencing as a teenager. We see a lot more details of the Damelio family’s life that we don’t get to see on social media, creating a bond and connection between us and them. This show was an extremely smart move on the family's part, as they now are receiving even more traction to their pages from people who don’t use social media because of their partnership with Hulu. I highly recommend this show and others to see more of the intricacies of celebrities’ lives, similar to Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Dance moms.
