WSJ Your Money Briefing - Social Media Can Be An Asset – So Who Gets It in a Divorce?

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

When couples who make their living from social media split up, assessing the accounts’ value can be complicated and messy. Wall Street Journal reporter Katherine Hamilton joins host Ariana Aspuru to discuss how to protect your social media assets in a divorce.  Sign up for the WSJ's free Markets A.M. newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Half research indicates nine out of ten hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. Robert Half is here to help. Our recruiting professionals utilize our proprietary AI to connect businesses with highly skilled talent. At Robert Half, we know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today. Here's your money briefing for Wednesday, October 30th. I'm Arianna Espudu for The Wall Street Journal, filling in for J.R. Whelan. Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans.

But in a divorce, that successful TikTok or Instagram account can become an asset worth fighting for. It's not like a typical business or obviously a house or something where you can predict how much it's going to increase or decrease in value over time because anything can happen, it can suddenly go viral. So who gets the account? Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Catherine Hamilton joins me after the break. Robert Half research indicates nine out of ten hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. Robert Half is here to help. Our recruiting professionals utilize our proprietary AI to connect businesses with highly skilled talent.

At Robert Half, we know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today. Splitting up assets in a divorce can be tricky, especially if one of those assets is a social media account with millions of followers. Wall Street Journal personal finance reporter Katherine Hamilton joins me. Katherine, this seems like a fairly new dilemma. What are some of the reasons why someone's social media account would come up in a divorce? It's definitely becoming a more common problem. There's 27 million people in the US who make money from social media,

and 44% of them are doing it as a full-time job. So when you get divorced and your mainstream of income is from social media, then those accounts are basically like an asset, like a house or a boat, that you have to value and then split up between the two partners. How do you put a value on a social media account? Is it just followers? It's really complicated. The money that's coming into a social media account is actually not really from followers

or from views. It's primarily from brand partnerships. So if a company pays you to talk about their product in one of your videos, it's becoming a really common way for people to market their products. So that's where most influencers are getting a lot of their wealth, which can be up in the six figures per year. So when you get divorced, you'll have forensic accountants, attorneys who are all going to look at how much income your accounts have been bringing in over the last year or so,

and then they're also gonna look at how much money they expected to continue bringing in after you get divorced. And that's where it gets a lot more tricky to evaluate because things can really change after you get divorced. Yeah, I mean, with social media, you never know. You could become a success overnight. You could go viral. Does that potential to make money make things more complicated?

Yes, it's not like a typical business or obviously a house or something where you can predict how much it's going to increase or decrease in value over time because anything can happen. It can suddenly go viral. And if you're creating a lot of content that is about your personal life and your relationship, and then you get divorced, that can cause a lot of people to unfollow you, you could lose a lot of popularity, or people might be really into it and might actually help you make more money. How does the type of content you make while you're still in that relationship impact what you could bring in if you get divorced. One good example here is Kat and Mike Stickler, who were creating content together during

the pandemic, they became really popular and they had a shared account called Mike and Kat where they posted about their relationship. They had about 4 million followers. And when they got divorced, that account was a big asset in their divorce and they had to figure out how to split it up. But because so much of their content was about their relationship, they knew that that was gonna really change. It was really tricky to split it up. They had a YouTube and a TikTok channel, and so Mike got the YouTube and Kat got the TikTok, and she was able to rebrand and create her own account where she now has over 10 million followers. And in the meantime, Mike took a step back from social media. His YouTube account is no longer active and he doesn't work on social media anymore.

You spoke to a divorce specialist specifically about splitting up social media. What are some things they recommend? Diversify your portfolio. If you have a shared account with your spouse or your partner, creating a lot of content also in your own personal accounts. So if you were to get divorced or break up and that shared account went away, you would still have something to fall back on.

And then also looking outside of social media, whether it's podcasts or books, or other ways where you can make money so you don't necessarily have to be a social media creator forever. Is there anything that can be done like really early on into a relationship to prevent a potentially messy social media divorce? One thing is a prenup prenuptial agreement.

Vivian too is one influencer that I talked to and she gives a lot of financial advice. And before she got married, she created a prenup where she included her whole business, which included her social media accounts, where she has millions of followers. That's the best way to work things out while you're still on good terms with your partner about how you would split things up so you don't have to do it when things are a bit harder

in your relationship. Are these strategies just for influencers or people looking to be influencers? Should people think about this in their day-to-day lives? Definitely. Talking about money and finances is always a really hard thing in relationships, but it's important to have those conversations. Again, when you're on good terms and it's easier to have the conversations. And that goes for any kind of shared business, shared

assets, joint bank accounts. That's going to be hard to split up if you ever break up. It's better to talk about it before you get to that point. That's WSJ reporter Catherine Hamilton. And that's it for your money briefing. This episode is produced by Zoe Kolkin with supervising producer, Melanie Roy. I'm Arianna Aspuru for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening.