- Amanda Castrillo is a 26-year-old who quit her retail job last year to pursue a career in content creation.
- Castrillo gets paid up to $10,000 per promotional post on TikTok and landed her dream job at Paramount.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Amanda Castrillo, a 26-year-old content creator with more than 300,000 followers on TikTok. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I was never super into social media, but when I was furloughed from my retail job for 3 months during the pandemic, I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started posting on TikTok.
My first video was a rant about the TV show "Avatar: The Last Airbender." It blew up, and people started asking for my opinions on other characters and other TV shows.
As my TikTok page started gaining followers, I realized I could attend red-carpet events and movie premieres.
I get paid to promote movies
When studios like Disney, Warner Brothers, or Universal have a movie project, they'll usually reach out to influencers like me as part of their promotional campaign. You get a contract, which will include things like exclusivity clauses, and then you negotiate rates for a one-off post about the movie.
Payment is based on: follower count, how much time you have to make the post, and exclusivity. Someone in my follower range can make between $3,000 to $10,000 per promotional campaign.
A close friend helped me create a media kit and told me how to pitch myself. I just started emailing companies my credentials and stuff I've done with my followers.
My first-ever red carpet event was the premiere of "Spider-Man: No Way Home," and that was amazing. I literally felt like I was living in a movie.
I started getting more promotional opportunities and invitations to events, but I was still working my retail job, which wasn't allowing me to take time off — even when I gave notice weeks in advance.
The breaking point came when I got Covid-19: my retail job asked me to come back "as soon as possible" instead of taking the required days off to quarantine, and I realized that was not okay.
In February 2022, I officially left retail without another job lined up.
One month later, I was offered a job as a social producer at Paramount. When I found out, I got on my knees on the kitchen floor and cried because it was the first time in my whole adult life that I wasn't working in the service industry.
I love my job at Paramount. I get to make memes and videos trying to make people laugh for a living. Paramount is cool about the fact that I also do promotions as an influencer: I actually put my TikTok account on my resume when I applied.
This profession isn't for the faint of heart
My job as an influencer is amazing, but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. There have been times when I've been straight-up lied to, underpaid, or just disrespected while doing outside promotional work.
One of the biggest things that hurts is when you know you could be farther along if you were part of a different demographic. There have been times when I noticed that people with one-third or one-fourth of my followers are getting things way easier than I ever could, and that's just frustrating. The only difference sometimes is literally my skin or gender, and what can I do about that?
This profession isn't for the faint of heart. It looks really cool, and that's because it is, but it's also a lot of work. Sometimes it's frustrating, but it can be very rewarding.