Data study · August 29, 2026
We analyzed 6.13Mof TikTok’s most discoverable creators. Even within this established set, reach is brutally top-heavy: the median creator has just ~12K followers, only 1.4% have a million, and just 3 accounts break 100M.
1.4%
of 6.13M established creators have 1M+ followers (83,083).
~12K
median followers
326
billion-likes club
Discoverable TikTok creators — snapshot August 29, 2026.
1.4%
of 6.13M established creators have 1M+ followers (83,083) — and only 3 accounts top 100M.
~12K
is the median follower count — half of all established creators have fewer. The middle class lives in the 1K–10K band.
326
creators have crossed a billion lifetime likes — and only 6 have passed five billion.
40/100
of the 100 most-followed are also in the 100 most-liked — reach and engagement are different races.
Split 6.13M discoverable creators by follower count and the shape is a pyramid with a fat middle: 42.94% are in the 10K–100K band, 12.58% reach 100K–1M, and the 1M+ tiers barely register. The mega-creators you can name are a rounding error.
Rank creators by total likes instead of followers and the leaderboard reshuffles. 326 creators have crossed a billion lifetime likes; only 6 have topped five billion. And reach ≠ engagement: of the 100 most-followed creators, only 40 are also in the 100 most-liked.
326
creators in the billion-likes club (≥1B lifetime likes).
6
have crossed five billion likes; 1,229 have passed 500M.
40/100
of the most-followed are also most-liked — reach and engagement diverge.
| # | Creator | Total likes | Followers |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @charlidamelio | 12.3B | 159.3M |
| 2 | @barstoolsports | 10.5B | 49.6M |
| 3 | @espn | 6.0B | 60.6M |
| 4 | @eduardo______________1 | 5.4B | 8.5M |
| 5 | @domelipa | 5.3B | 75.4M |
| 6 | @addisonre | 5.3B | 87.8M |
| 7 | @brookemonk_ | 4.7B | 48.7M |
| 8 | @kimberly.loaiza | 4.3B | 83.3M |
| 9 | @dailymail | 4.1B | 26.6M |
| 10 | @pubity | 4.1B | 18.6M |
@barstoolsports (10.5B likes, 49.6M followers) and @eduardo______________1 (5.4B likes, 8.5Mfollowers) rank higher by likes than nearly every household name — engagement isn’t reach.
Two markers of a monetizing creator — a verified badge and a contact email for deals — move in opposite directions at the top. Verification only crosses 50% above ~5M followers (82.9% at 10M+, though about 1 in 6 of even those stay unbadged). Business-contact-in-bio peaks at 5.3% around 1M and then falls to 2.5% at 10M+ — the very biggest creators route deals through management, not a public inbox.
Verified, by follower band
Business contact in bio, by follower band
The handful of accounts above 70M followers — Khaby Lame leads with ~162M. Click any creator for their live follower count and stats.
| # | Creator | Followers | Total likes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | @khaby.lame | 162.7M | 2.7B |
| 2 | @charlidamelio | 159.3M | 12.3B |
| 3 | @mrbeast | 139.0M | 1.4B |
| 4 | @bellapoarch | 91.7M | 2.4B |
| 5 | @addisonre | 87.8M | 5.3B |
| 6 | @williesalim | 87.0M | 1.8B |
| 7 | @zachking | 86.9M | 1.3B |
| 8 | @fifaworldcup | 86.1M | 3.2B |
| 9 | @kimberly.loaiza | 83.3M | 4.3B |
| 10 | @bts_official_bighit | 80.7M | 1.8B |
| 11 | @therock | 79.8M | 684.7M |
| 12 | @willsmith | 78.2M | 668.8M |
| 13 | @realmadrid | 76.5M | 2.3B |
| 14 | @domelipa | 75.4M | 5.3B |
Profiled across the ~2,029 creators with 10M+ followers: they are prolific, deeply engaged, and follow almost nobody.
1,770
median videos posted
294K
median likes per video
26.9
lifetime likes per follower (median)
26%
follow fewer than 100 accounts
Scoped to the ~2,029most-followed creators (the dataset API can’t cleanly sample the mid-tier). “Likes per follower” is lifetime likes ÷ current followers — a robust proxy, not a per-video engagement rate; for per-video engagement by niche see the TikTok Engagement Index.
The same figures behind the charts — plain HTML tables, easy to copy and machine-readable for search engines and AI answer engines that can't parse a chart.
| Follower band | Creators | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 10M+ | 2,029 | 0.03% |
| 1M–10M | 81,054 | 1.32% |
| 100K–1M | 771,401 | 12.58% |
| 10K–100K | 2,474,368 | 40.34% |
| 1K–10K | 2,634,089 | 42.94% |
| Under 1K | 170,912 | 2.79% |
| Follower band | Verified | Contact in bio |
|---|---|---|
| All creators | 1.4% | 1.2% |
| 100K+ followers | 6.8% | 3.5% |
| 1M+ followers | 27.6% | 5.3% |
| 5M+ followers | 64.4% | 4.5% |
| 10M+ followers | 82.9% | 2.5% |
| Seed term | Creators surfaced |
|---|---|
| Gaming | 201,561 |
| Food | 141,288 |
| Fashion | 136,640 |
| Beauty | 132,419 |
| Sports | 126,487 |
| Music | 114,109 |
| Education | 109,243 |
| Tech | 108,106 |
| Travel | 104,644 |
| Fitness | 91,634 |
This measures crawler reach, not content categories. Each creator carries the one keyword that surfaced them first, whatever they actually post — the “Gaming” list includes creators whose work sits nowhere near the term, and “top” is itself a seed term holding tens of thousands of accounts. Read a row as “this keyword reached this many creators.”
We aggregated Crawlora’s TikTok creator dataset — 6,133,853 creators as of August 29, 2026 — with count queries over follower-count bands, the verified flag, and whether a contact email appears in the bio. Figures are a point-in-time snapshot; the dataset grows daily.
Scope. This is a set of discoverable, established creators (seeded popularity-first), not a random sample of all TikTok accounts — 54% already have 10K+ followers. Read every figure as “among established creators.” It describes the working-and-up creator landscape, not the long tail of casual accounts. The per-creator keyword field is a discovery seed term, not a content classification— it records which search keyword surfaced an account first, so we report it as crawler reach and never as a niche breakdown. We don’t report engagement here — for engagement by niche see the TikTok Engagement Index. The aggregate rollups are open under CC BY 4.0; we publish aggregates only, never individual creator records.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). State of TikTok Creators 2026. 1.4% of 6.13M established TikTok creators have 1M+ followers. https://crawlora.net/tiktok-creators-index.
Among 6,133,853 established TikTok creators, only 1.4% — about 83,083 accounts — have 1M or more followers. Just 3 accounts top 100M (Khaby Lame, Charli D'Amelio and MrBeast). The median established creator has only ~12K followers, and 42.94% sit in the 1K–10K band.
1.4% of established creators carry a verified badge (86,761 of 6,133,853). Verification is essentially a top-tier marker: 6.8% of creators with 100K+ followers are verified, rising to 27.6% at 1M+, 64.4% at 5M+ and 82.9% at 10M+ — yet about 1 in 6 creators with 10M+ followers still carry no badge.
Only 1.2% of established creators put a contact email in their bio. It climbs with size — 3.5% at 100K+, peaking at 5.3% at 1M+ — and then falls back to 2.5% at 10M+: the very biggest creators route brand deals through management, not a public inbox. (We report the rate only; the contacts themselves are never published.)
326 creators have crossed a billion lifetime likes; 1,229 have passed 500 million, and only 6 have topped five billion. Charli D'Amelio leads with 12.3B lifetime likes — but the likes pyramid looks very different from the follower pyramid.
Mostly not. Of the 100 most-followed creators, only 40 are also among the 100 most-liked. Reach and engagement are different races: @barstoolsports has 10.5B likes on 49.6M followers and @eduardo______________1 5.4B on just 8.5M — both rank higher by likes than almost every household name.
Among the ~2,029 creators with 10M+ followers, the typical one has posted 1,770 videos, earns about 294K likes per video and ~26.9 lifetime likes per follower — and follows almost nobody: 26% follow fewer than 100 accounts.
No. This is a study of ~6.13M discoverable, established creators (54% already have 10K+ followers), not a random sample of all TikTok accounts. It describes the working-and-up creator landscape — the population brands, agencies and tools actually care about — not the long tail of casual accounts. It's a point-in-time snapshot taken August 29, 2026.
Every figure here comes from Crawlora’s TikTok creator data. Search creators by keyword, follower count and verification, pull per-creator stats and engagement, and find the 1.2% who list a business contact — the API behind this study.