Reuters
TikTok is a wildly popular video platform owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance.
- TikTok is a video platform especially popular with Gen Z, and it has over 1.5 billion downloads.
- Skylar Krupa, a 19-year-old from Alberta, Canada, and his grandmother, Jenny Krupa, run a successful TikTok account with over 400,000 followers and more than 12.6 million likes called @its_j_dog.
- The two mostly make videos for fun, sometimes including Skylar's grandfather as well.
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TikTok isn't just for Gen Z, and Jenny Krupa, an 87-year-old TikTok star, is proof.
Krupa stars in videos produced by her 19-year-old grandson, Skylar Krupa, created at the farm where they live in a small town in Alberta, Canada.
While 2019 is only the first full calendar year TikTok has existed in the United States, it's quickly become popular enough to worry competitors like Facebook, which tried to buy the company's predecessor, Musical.ly, in 2016. Now, the app has become a fixture in teen culture: it has 1.5 billion downloads, and is the top free non-gaming app in the US. The video platform is likely closing in on Instagram and Snapchat in terms of active users - Instagram reached 1 billion monthly active users in 2018, while Snapchat has over 300 million.
Although TikTok stars have had less success so far monetizing popular accounts than their YouTube and Instagram counterparts, TikTok has proven itself as a platform where users can gain followers and fame in a short period of time - songs like Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road," for example, made the leap from TikTok popularity to the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100.
Here's how one grandmother and grandson duo is using TikTok to have fun and create a new kind of influencer.
