When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.
Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat.
“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”
Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.
For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel.
“If the TikTok account was left to me, it would keep growing, but if it wasn’t, it would stop,” said Kat, 29, in the podcast interview.
She was right.
Kat got the TikTok, changed that handle to KatStickler and now has almost 10.5 million followers. She has another three million across Instagram, YouTube and Facebook . The channels, where Kat posts skits impersonating her mother and snippets of her everyday life, have earned her enough to buy a condo and become a small business investor.
Mike ended up with the YouTube account, which is now defunct. He now works in sales and declined to comment.
There are 27 million paid content creators in the U.S., and 44% of them say social media is their full-time job, consultant The Keller Advisory Group found.
The big bucks don’t come from views or followers. Brands pay influencers to recommend a product or service to their audience. U.S. advertisers paid content creators $26 billion in 2023, according to Statista.
Once divorce specialists tally up how much money the accounts are raking in, the couple can divide them, or one partner can take more and buy out the other.
But there’s one elusive factor in a digital asset’s value: the account’s potential to keep making money. Both partners have to make a case for their role in that potential. How many pranks did they think of? How many hours did they spend editing videos?
“There’s typically one person in the relationship who is passionate about social media, who’s driving the business,” says Cameron Ajdari, who runs a talent management group with his wife representing some of TikTok’s most followed couples.
It’s not always clear who that person is by the time divorce rolls around. Social media success often evolves quickly, and couples may not be prepared to track finances and labor.
Reza and Puja Khan say everything they’ve done to amass about five million followers on shared channels has been a team effort. They started posting about their wedding in 2020 and, within months, Puja was able to quit her office job. Now, they estimate social media brings in about half a million dollars a year.
Almost all of that goes into a joint bank account. It was a little overwhelming to see their incomes jump so fast, far above what their parents made, say Reza, 28, and Puja, 27. They hired a financial adviser earlier this year, but the idea of dividing their empire has never crossed Puja’s mind.
“This is the first time we’re actually thinking about it,” she says. “If I really went public with a hypothetical split, that could create its own momentum.”
The way influencers rebuild their brands after breaking up can make or break their careers.
If the person got popular by posting memes or makeup tutorials, they probably won’t take much of a financial hit from a divorce. But there could be more damage if a lot of the videos feature family time.
“One could take it over and they just rebrand, which is risky,” says Nina Shayan Depatie, a divorce attorney in Los Angeles who has worked with influencers. “When you’re looking at the valuation, you would have to consider that.”
Ayumi Lashley, 34, started creating social media videos with her husband in 2017. They made it their full-time job in 2020 and the accounts paid for her car and house, she says.
When they divorced in 2023, they both tried to elevate their personal profiles, but their fan base is still attached to a nonexistent relationship. She says she chose not to share much about the split and lost a few thousand followers, while her ex posted more about the divorce.
“A lot of people were very upset with me for not talking about it,” Lashley says. “His career is doing amazing and mine is not.”
Many content creators don’t intend to make videos of their daily outfits forever, even if it isn’t divorce that ends their careers.
“I always joke we’re like NFL players. You get five or 10 good years, but you take one bad hit to the knee and you’re done,” says Vivian Tu, 30, who posts about financial literacy to roughly eight million followers. “You can’t control the algorithms. You can’t control what is in vogue and what’s not.”
Tu says she is preparing for a life away from social media by developing other streams of income, including writing a book and hosting a podcast.
She is also aware of what divorce could do to her business. Tu wrote up a prenuptial agreement that included all her social-media accounts before she got married in June.
“My social media is my résumé,” Tu says. “Why would I allow anybody else to put my work on their résumé?”
Write to Katherine Hamilton at katherine.hamilton@wsj.com
