LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Over the weekend, President Donald Trump said he gives his “blessing” to a proposed deal for the popular viral-video social media app TikTok to partner with Oracle and Walmart to make the app a majority U.S. owned company, due to national security concerns by the federal government.

TikTok was supposed to be banned from new downloads just before midnight on Sunday. Now, that is pushed back to 11:59 p.m. on September 27, 2020, and it’s set to be banned entirely in the U.S. not too far after, on November 12. 

Lexington native, Parker Pannell, has 2.2 million followers on the app. The various ways to monetize his influence on the app he said accounts for 50 percent of his income stream. However, the 17-year-old TikTok celebrity, who currently lives in Los Angeles, said he hasn’t felt too emotional about the possibility that the app could be banned.

“Like I’ve never spent long sleepless hours just crying in my bed because TikTok‘s going to go bye-bye,” Pannell said jokingly, showing what his followers follow him for, prank, lip-syncing, and humor-filled videos that make people laugh. 

“I’m moving on with my day-to-day life and not really worried too much about it. Yes, I wake up and try to educate myself on the daily news regarding TikTok, but I’m moving on. You know, TikTok is not my long-term goal,” Pannell told Spectrum News 1. 

However, he said the social media platform has opened a lot of doors for his longterm goal of becoming a television actor and stand-up comedian. 

“Obviously, that can be very difficult. What’s great about social media is I can take ownership of my own career, you know,” Pannell said. He explained how having a social media following has helped with auditions, and having a platform allows him to post videos he enjoys creating while waiting for his next audition or booking. 

“Like right now, I can just record a story [and say], ‘Great! I just did my job for the day,” Pannell said.

Parker starred in his first viral video when he was five-year-old, when his mom, Whitney Pannell, recorded him impersonating King Burger employee Bon Qui Qui, a fast-food worker known for her sassy attitude from the sketch comedy show MAD TV. She posted the video in 2009 to her and her husband’s Lexington-based real estate company’s YouTube Channel, and it received over 63,000 views.

Whitney said she started using social media in 2007, when Facebook only recently allowed everyone, not just college students, to join, and Twitter was only a year old. She quickly realized social media would help her grow her real estate business.

“People were laughing in real estate and real estate agents were snickering,” she told Spectrum News 1. Her intuition was right, and it’s led her to speak at seminars around the country regarding the use of social media in real estate marketing. 

Dubbed Momma Pannell on TikTok, she now has 70,000 followers. She said about 70 percent of her real estate business comes from her social media channels, especially Facebook.

“I don’t think if TikTok goes away it will really affect my real estate career because it’s just a small, small portion of my business,” Mrs. Pannell explained. However, said she would feel bad for her son because of the time and effort it took him to get to 2.2 million followers. 

Parker said he would miss his 2.2 million followers the most if TikTok were banned in the future.

Parker makes money off of TikTok from partnerships, like song promotions. He said, on average, he used to get up to three deals a week. However, when Trump signed an executive order on August 6 to ban TikTok, if its parent company didn’t sell the app, Parker said the deals stopped.

However, in the past two weeks, Parker said the deals have come back, but the back-and-forth has made him fast-track a new income strategy, monetizing his YouTube channel. 

“It’s like one day it’s gone, and it’s going to be banned, and the next it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s here to stay,” Whitney explained. “So with YouTube, it’s not going anywhere. Google is obviously, you know, a monster in the industry.”

Pannell first posted to TikTok just a few days before the 2017 New Year. However, he didn’t post often, only four videos until he started to post more consistently after an October 2018 video went viral and received 826,400 views. 

From there, the views went way down, but he was consistent in posting, which Parker said is important for TikTok’s algorithm. 

Pannell’s first video to hit over one million views was in March 2019, which included a prank video of him deleting all of his mom’s cell phone data. 

From that point forward, his videos seemed to consistently go viral, some reaching 30,000 people. Around June 2019, Parker started consistently having 100,000 views. His most-watched video to date garnered 18.8 million views. In that video, he is lip-syncing “Shallow” when a stranger in a grocery store spontaneously joins him.

“It’s all about being consistent on TikTok, and not being sporadic, like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna post on Wednesday and post on Friday,” Parker explained. “TikTok’s algorithm has to know like he is a consistent creator, and he’s gonna be posting day after day, after day, and sometimes more than once in one day.” 

Parker said before he switched his strategy to focus more on monetizing YouTube, he used to post three videos a day to TikTok. Now, he only posts one video per day, but he said he’s noticed it’s more about quality over quantity, too. Parker also uses his account now mainly to cross-promote by getting his 2.2 million followers to check out his YouTube channel. 

“The fans and the followers are in a frenzy; they don’t want to lose their biggest creator just of course just like they are creating their own content fans are also in their own addictive habit of just wiping and scrolling and seeing the next video so you can all imagine we’re all in the same boat we just want ticktock to stay and not leave so we’re all just kind of on the edge of our seat waiting.”

On Saturday, TikTok’s communications team tweeted in part, “We are pleased that the proposal between TikTok, Oracle, and Walmart will resolve the security concerns of the U.S. Administration and settle questions around TikTok’s future in the U.S.”

If the deal is sealed, the plan is to maintain and expand TikTok Global’s headquarters in the U.S., which they estimate will bring 25,000 jobs.