After accumulating millions of views on the TikTok platform, the 24-year-old videographer is launching an assault on the music industry. The music video for “Build a B*tch” is already breaking records.
Bella Poarch is a TikTok star who has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame over the past few months . Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, when many other artists were struggling to make ends meet, Poarch discovered her voice on the video-sharing platform and racked up millions of views on TikTok. Although she has been embroiled in several controversies, Poarch has managed to rise above the fray and these days she is one of the biggest social media stars of the year – and is on track to becoming even more famous.
On May 14, a young popular videographer on the TikTok social network released her first single on all online music streaming platforms. Almost two weeks after its release, its title Build a B * tch counted more than 114 million views on YouTube, and thousands of more or less amateur videographers took up the lyrics on TikTok. If you don’t have an account on the video-sharing platform, owned by Chinese Bytedance, the incredible popularity of her music may raise questions: but who is Bella Poarch?
Who is Bella Poarch?
Born in the Philippines on February 8, 1997, Bella had a less than idyllic childhood. She never knew her biological parents and for the first three years of her life she was raised by her grandmother in a slum. Things did not improve when she was adopted.
Bella was adopted by a white American man and his Filipina wife when she was three years old. Her adoptive father was stationed in the army in the Philippines and they owned a farm there.
Bella and her foster younger brother were forced to work long, hard hours on the farm from an early age and were punished by their foster father if their work wasn’t good enough.Her older adoptive sisters weren’t treated that way, Bella told theH3Podcast.
Bella said she wouldn’t have breakfast if she hadn’t cleaned the yard well enough before morning at the farm. Her adoptive father also beat her regularly. She said, “my nickname was stupid b***h growing up.
Bella moved to the United States at the age of 14, when her adoptive father had to return to the United States for heart surgery. She went to high school in San Francisco and loved being in school because it was an “escape” from home life.
Poarch’s early career choice was the United States Navy, and she would have served in the Navy for three years, beginning in 2017. Poarch did not explain her reasons for leaving the Navy, and in her Instagram bio, she proudly declares that she is a veteran.
In April 2020, Poarch started posting on her TikTok account, but it wasn’t until August that she really started gaining notoriety. She loved music, singing and art since her childhood. Bella was one of those girls who loves to play computer games and watch cartoons. Anime is a Japanese style of animation and drawing. Bella is known for her great passion for Naruto. Bella even said that she sometimes wishes she lived in the world of anime. Poarch loves playing Fortnite, Warface, and Minecraft. His family decided to move to Texas when he was 13 years old.
Poarch serves in the U.S. Navy, she enlisted in 2017 and served for three years. Bella was reportedly stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii and Japan. She is now a US Navy veteran. Poarch revealed on her Twitter in August 2020 that she had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) since 2017. Bella currently lives in Hawaii.
TikTok Career
Nothing seemed to predestine this 24-year-old woman from the Philippines to become one of the biggest stars of the TikTok social network, which is particularly popular among young Internet users. After three years working in the US Navy, the young woman left her post in 2020 and decided to embark on this new fashionable platform. The oldest video still online on her account dates from April 2020, and is absolutely banal: we see her, sitting on her bed, a video game controller in her hand, reacting while listening to the video of another TikTok user.
A few months and around thirty other short videos later, the young creator publishes a clip that looks just as innocuous. Set to rhythmic music, she films herself in close-up and multiplies kawaii (“cute” in Japanese) expressions that look like something out of a Japanese anime. The trick is done: Bella Poarch becomes in a few days the most famous face of the platform by publishing the most watched video of TikTok of all time (49.5 million views to date).
In the aftermath, the popularity of the music used in the video also exploded: hitherto obscure, Soph Aspin Send (now better known as M to the B ), signed four years earlier by British teenage rapper Millie B as a response to her rival Sophie Aspin, becomes an international phenomenon and is reused in more than 5.8 million videos on TikTok. It thus approaches the record of Jason Derulo’s song, Savage Love , another phenomenal title having been used in 6 million videos.
From social media to the music industry
Where many would have stumbled before this sudden success, Bella Poarch, instead of repeating the recipe that made her famous, gradually introduced her audience to her talents as a singer. Sitting in a corner of her room, she gently takes up songs of the moment on the ukulele. In addition to showing her performances as a singer, she continues to appropriate the codes of the network by surfing all the viral phenomena of the platform. It quickly established itself as one of the references of “TikTok culture”.
She also collaborates with artists like Tyga and Justin Bieber, who use her notoriety on the platform to promote their own music. In December 2020, Bella Poarch reached 50 million subscribers on TikTok.
Like other influencers of the same level of popularity, she will then try her luck in the music industry. She thus follows in the footsteps of Dixie D’Amelio – the sister of Charli D’Amelio (116 million subscribers) – whose single Be Happy has been listened to 106 million times on YouTube in ten months, or Addison Rae (80 million subscribers), which recorded 20 million views in two months with the song Obsessed .
Two weeks after its release on May 14, the clip for Build a B*tch , Bella Poarch’s first track, has already accumulated more than 114 million views. A figure that only the heavyweights of the recording industry, such as the South Korean group BTS, manage to surpass.
Star cast
In the clip, the new darling of the Web did not fail to show that she was now playing on equal terms with the biggest stars of the Web, by recruiting many other influencers like Valkyrae, streamer and co-owner of the structure of e-sports 100 Thieves, Mia Khalifa, American-Lebanese influencer, or Bretman Rock, American-Filipino beauty influencer.
This is the strength of the social network phenomenon TikTok: the possibility for everyone to access fame from scratch. An innocuous little video, which did not look like much, finally allowed Bella Poarch to join the ranks of these essential superstars of Web culture. Nine months after her kawaii video, she is the third most followed person on TikTok with 71 million followers.
2 million subscribers in one day
But as detailed by specialist Pierre Lapin on Twitter , it was not until mid-August that Bella Poarch’s notoriety gained momentum. On the 16th, she published a playback (or “lip sync”) on a mash-up signed Jvke, a TikToker with 2 million subscribers. This is where all the young eyes turn to the videographer: she gains several hundred thousand subscribers a day – up to 2 million on the day of the 27th, according to Social Blade.
Two days later, she published another video in the same style on another track, It’s M to the B by Millie B, and participated in the creation of a new challenge. The impact is international: in France alone, it is picked up by Natoo and EnjoyPhoenix , as CNews notes.
What is Bella Poarch net worth?
While Bella Poarch is still a rising star and likely has a bright future in entertainment ahead of her, the young entertainer has already established herself as one of the top earners on TikTok. Her exact net worth is not known, but given that Poarch is a TikTok partner and gets paid for clicks and views, it seems possible that she is accumulating a lot of money.
Additionally, given TikTok’s launch of a $200 million fund to pay creators, it’s very possible that Poarch will become one of the richest young women on social media in the next few years. The rest of the year will likely be very vital for Poarch, as it expands its audience base and continues to post content that its fan base will enjoy and share.
What’s next for Bella Poarch?
Through it all, Bella Poarch has remained transparent with her fans about what drives her. Poarch is a fan of anime , K-pop, and video games, and her content reflects her varied interests. Poarch said she struggles with PTSD, anxiety and depression, and music is one thing that helps her stay focused on the positive. Fans have reacted well to Poarch’s vulnerability, as well as his sassy TikTok videos, and for this young social media star, it certainly seems like the sky is the limit. Poarch has yet to reveal any special projects she has lined up for the rest of the year and into 2021, but if her trajectory resembles that of fellow TikTok, Charli D’Amelio, she will no doubt experience amazing successes over the next. a few months — maybe even endorsement deals and exclusive collaborations.
