Meet Leon Ondieki, a Kenyan American social media influencer, content creator, and full-time college student from the Atlanta area.

"I love creating content that involves social interaction. The majority of my videos are recorded on college campuses and in public settings. My overall goal with my account is to spread positivity to the participants in my videos and viewers of my content" Leon

 Leon has 1.1 Million TikTok followers with a monthly video views of over 178 million

Source: Y254 Channel

 Turn on your recording device, choose an app, free-style or prepare a script, face the camera, record, or livestream, post your content and bam! you become one of the nearly 50 million content creators worldwide using social media to disseminate news, entertainment and information. Whether doing so as a professional or an amateur, there will somehow be an audience one will attract and if lucky enough, command a faithful following that could result in monetizing one’s account.

Well, just a few years ago, profits derived from advertising and airtime were mostly enjoyed by well-established media houses which had professional equipment, licensing, and trained journalists to create and disseminate news and information.

Contrary to then, the introduction of smart phones and other affordable digital devices has paved way for independent content creators to have a piece of the pie in the content creator economy, which according to Forbes, is estimated at $100 Billion. With projections of added growth.

Favored by the isolation of populations due to Covid-19, the number of content creators continues to grow as social media presents a safer environment for socialization and an alternative to the traditional role television and radio plays as a source of entertainment and news.

For Leon Ondieki, a sophomore at UGA, finding himself in this niche economy came way before the pandemic. Boredom led him to post his first video when he was in high school. His platform of choice was tiktok, one of the fastest growing short-form video sharing platforms, according to forbes.com. He didn’t think much about his post on the platform until his phone started going off with notifications. His seemingly random post had gone viral, and just like that, a simple post turned into a passion.

Three years later, TikTok is not just a platform to pass time, it has become a fulltime job, a platform to grow his skills and of course, provide him a slice of the creative content economy pie.

In a recent televised interview, Leon spoke about how to monetize on TikTok…

 You can follow Leon at leon.ond