Nikita Dragun
Nikita Dragun.
- Nikita Dragun first started posting videos on YouTube in 2013.
- Since that year, she has built an audience of over 2.6 million subscribers on the platform and 5.8 million followers on Instagram.
- Dragun explained to Business Insider that sharing her personal story and creating her own niche on social media was instrumental to her success.
- "People may look at my social media and not realize that I am a businesswoman," she shared. "Yes, I'm living my life, but I have a business mindset and I've gained success by being strategic."
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With more than 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube and almost six million followers on Instagram, 23-year-old Nikita Dragun has become one of the most well-recognized beauty influencers in the industry. Beyond makeup tutorials, she's known for her bold looks, her openness about her journey as a transgender woman, and living her life unphased by what other people think of her.
"I don't care who talks about me because when I come around nothing is said to me," the LA-based YouTuber recently tweeted to her over one million followers on the platform. And her fans responded well; the tweet received over 30,000 retweets and 67,000 likes.
In addition to growing her following on social media, Dragun launched her own cosmetics line, "Dragun Beauty," in 2019. Today, she is managed exclusively by LA-based talent group Slash Management. Slash Management told Business Insider that Dragun has asked brands for a six-figure fee for sponsorships.
But it's been a long journey - over a span of seven years - to get to this point, she told Business Insider.
"People may look at my social media and not realize that I am a businesswoman," she said. "Yes, I'm living my life, but I have a business mindset and I've gained success by being strategic."
Getting her start online
Dragun started sharing photos of herself in full makeup on Instagram in 2012 before she turned to YouTube. "I got made fun of often in high school because I was using all of these hashtags and trying, in any way possible, to get more people to view my page," she remembered. "But I saw the power of likes and followers early."
When Dragun graduated high school in 2014, she turned down a scholarship at a performing arts college. "Everyone was up in arms because I was supposed to go off to college, but that was when I started to question my gender identity and I needed to find myself," Dragun said.
She took a year off of school, stayed in Virginia, and started to take social media - this time, including YouTube - "very seriously." The next year, she received a scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in LA. "My parents were pleased because I got a scholarship to go to LA, but in reality, I was thinking, 'Oh, I'm set out to start with this YouTube and Instagram thing.'"
Building a consistent brand and telling her personal story
"When you start on YouTube, consistency is key," Dragun said. When she first moved to LA for school, she aimed to upload one new makeup tutorial every month on the platform. Each video would take approximately four hours to film, she estimated. "If you're consistently putting out great content and stuff that speaks to your audience, that's how you build yourself," she said.
In the beginning, she was getting about 20,000 views on each of her videos - "maybe 100,000 thousand on a rare occasion," she added.
That changed when she posted a video in December 2015 titled "I Am TRANSGENDER." In the video, Dragun shares with her audience for the first time that she is a transgender woman and tells stories from her childhood.
"The video went viral," Dragun recalled. "I want to say like overnight it had 300,000 views. And then by the end of the next week, it had one million," she said. "It was crazy."
Nikita Dragun
Nikita Dragun.
She says she posted the video partly to come out to herself. "I decided to just jump off the ledge with it because I was so unwilling to even admit it to myself," she explained.Not only did Dragun gain followers on all of her social media platforms due to the viral success of the video, but she also saw a difference in how her audience interacted with her content.
"I started getting more comments on Instagram, and I noticed on all my platforms [that] everyone was way more attached to me because I was being truthful," she said. "It's easy for me to now say, 'Oh, be yourself,' but it's true. People will want to hear more from you because they're interested in your personal story."
Finding a niche
"On social media, you have to treat yourself as a business and as a brand," Dragun explained. "And you have to figure out what it is that your brand is offering to the consumer that no one else can offer."
When she started posting on YouTube, Dragun tried to emulate some of the successful videos from already-established influencers. But she soon realized that creating a unique image for herself would be more effective. She's since become known for her over-the-top outfits, runway walks, and relatable videos.
"I think you can see when I put out content now, it's like, 'That's so Nikita.'" She points to her Victoria Secret fantasy video as an example. In 2018, Ed Razek, the then-chief marketing officer of Victoria Secret's parent company L Brands, suggested that trans women aren't part of the fantasy Victoria Secret is trying to sell. In response, Dragun created a video of herself "selling the fantasy." The short film went viral, garnering approximately 14 million views on both Instagram and Twitter.
"I invested so much into that video and completed it in like 72 hours from the thought to the actual production of it," Dragun said. "It was another instance of me speaking my truth and speaking up for my community."
Staying authentic in ads and brand deals
"When I first moved to LA, a lot of the waist-trainer and teeth-whitening type brands were contacting me," Dragun said. "And I did a lot of these sponsorships because, at the time, I was a broke college student and it felt like free money."
But as she grew her audience, she decided to change her approach. "I was seeing a lot of accounts with an extreme amount of sponsorships, but if you're promoting everything, there's going to be a quick burnout because your audience isn't going to trust you anymore," she said. "I established pretty early that I didn't want to take on too many sponsorships."
The same applies to ads within a YouTube video. "The more views you get, the more money you make. And the more ads in the video, the more money you make," Dragun said. "But you need to strike a balance. If you put too many ads in a 15-minute video, your audience is going to become frustrated."
Recently, Dragun has promoted Poshmark, 'Hustlers' the movie, and Sephora on her Instagram page.
Just start
"I've never been a read-the-book type of girl," Dragun said. "My No. 1 tip to people looking to start on YouTube is to just start. You look at any YouTuber. The way they started is not where they are now. People ask me what camera and lights they need, but I started with my phone duct taped to my window. Try new things out, and figure out your style while you're doing it."
