In June 2021, a group of Black TikTok creators announced they were on strike: no original choreography for a new song by Megan Thee Stallion.
Their complaint, theGrio reported, was that other creators copy their dances, simplify them and collect the credit. No formal resolution was reported, and at least one user disputed that the strike was happening at all. The grievance behind it was not new.
Credit on the internet is not only a matter of manners. It decides who builds an audience, and audience size feeds directly into what brands are willing to pay. This article follows that chain, from the origin of trends to the pay data, and is careful about where the evidence is strong and where it is thin.
Slang with a documented lineage
Language is the clearest case, because linguists have traced it. In an April 2026 NBC News report on how Black culture shapes internet slang, anthropologist and linguist Jamaal Muwwakkil of the University of Washington said many popular terms trace back to African American Language, a variety with its own structural rules.
The report cites Merriam-Webster for several roots. “Cap” came out of 2010s Atlanta rap, “lit” and “drip” from rap music, and “rizz” was popularized by a Black streamer in 2022 before Oxford University Press named it 2023 Word of the Year. Georgetown linguist Minnie Annan cautioned against overstating it: not all slang comes from African American Language, she said, but the inspiration behind many terms often does, and ignoring the origins is the problem.
That is a careful claim, and worth keeping careful. Nobody owns a word, and language spreads by borrowing. The question the linguists raise is attribution, not ownership. Muwwakkil argued that Black speech is often mocked when Black people use it but celebrated when non-Black people do, which is a claim about double standards that readers can weigh for themselves.
What the pay data shows
The best-known measurement of the money side comes from MSL U.S. and The Influencer League, whose 2021 study “Time to Face the Influencer Pay Gap” surveyed more than 400 US influencers. As NBC News reported, the study found a 35% gap between white and Black influencers, and 29% between white and all Black, Indigenous and other creators of color.
The study’s tier breakdown explains how a gap like that can arise. About 77% of Black influencers in the sample had fewer than 50,000 followers, against about 59% of white influencers, a difference of 18 percentage points. Nano and micro influencers averaged about $27,000 a year, while macro influencers averaged upward of $100,000. Only 23% of Black influencers reached the macro tier, compared with 41% of white influencers.
Self-reported attitudes pointed the same way. Nearly half of Black influencers said their race had led to offers below market value, and 59% said that discussing race hurt their income, versus 14% of white creators.
Reading the numbers with care
A survey of a few hundred influencers is not a census of the industry and dates from 2021, and every figure above comes from respondents describing their own pay and offers. The study as reported also does not isolate why Black creators sit lower in the tiers. Reach, brand selection, the type of content and attribution could all play a part, and the data cannot rank them.
What the numbers do show is a structural pattern. Pay rises sharply with follower count, and in this sample Black creators were concentrated in the lower tiers. If trends that begin with Black creators are credited elsewhere, as the strike participants alleged, the audience that follows the trend goes to someone else, and so does the rate card. That chain is an inference, not something the study proved, but it is the one creators themselves describe.
Getting paid without waiting to be credited
One response is to reduce dependence on intermediaries, for creators who want that kind of work. Direct-to-fan models pay creators from subscribers rather than from a brand’s budget. Global OnlyFans revenue reached $7.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from 2024, according to new data from OnlyGuider reported by Protothema.
Directory pages that group adult creators by category, including those for readers searching for Black girls worth following, let audiences find people by name and label rather than by whatever a feed happens to surface. The OnlyGuider figures are third-party estimates, not platform disclosures, so they show the scale of the market more reliably than any single creator’s earnings. That is discovery without a brand gatekeeper. It does not fix attribution, since a creator can still be copied, but it gives audiences a direct route to the original.
What better credit could look like
The MSL researchers did not stop at the diagnosis. According to NBC’s report, they recommended bridging the gap through sponsorship and education, more pay transparency, and advocacy for creators of color in how marketing teams are structured. MSL U.S. also committed to releasing an influencer pay index.
None of that requires a platform change. A brand can name the originator of a dance in a campaign and publish its rate ranges. A publisher can credit the creator of a trend the first time it covers it.
Neither step costs much, and both can be checked by anyone reading a campaign credit. Whether those habits spread will show up in the next round of pay surveys, if anyone runs one.
