If it hadn’t been for TikTok, Matt Rife would have probably still been trying to get his name out there. The comedian shared with The New York Times that before he became famous, he was only averaging 70 tickets per show — sometimes earning only $150 a night.
But then he decided to post his stuff on TikTok, something he was initially skeptical about. “I’m about to post this video of crowd work. I was watching it, and I was like, this is so stupid. Why am I even doing this?” But it ended up being a huge advantage for him as he went viral overnight. “That video did 20 million views in two or three days,” he recalled. “It became this massive chain reaction and an explosion of an audience. From then on, every video I posted went viral.” As of this writing, Rife has 16.3 million followers on TikTok and 5.2 million followers on Instagram.
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In an interview with E! News, Rife confessed that even though he has contempt for social media, it ultimately brought him to new heights. “Social media has changed everything for me,” he said. “I mean, just in the past 10 months, everything has shifted because of clips online. But for the past two, three years, when everything was kind of exponentially growing towards social media for stand up, luckily, it’s changed everything.”
