Nieman Foundation at Harvard
When 27-year-old Jackie Flores tells people she’s a full-time content creator, they incorrectly assume her content blends her two main interests: true crime and beauty.
“I’ve seen pages where people do their makeup while talking about true crime,” said Flores, who posts researched true crime retellings as @truecrimejackie. “I feel like, we’re speaking about something so serious and actual human beings, and their real family members [are watching], you should have the most respect and take it as seriously as possible.”
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These creators’ primary platforms are TikTok, YouTube, and podcasts. They make varying amounts of money from their work, but it’s usually not their sole source of income. None have worked as professional journalists, but they try to inform their audiences in careful, respectful, and ethical ways.1 They prioritize empathy for victims and their loved ones. They often do in-depth research and verification, interview people close to cases, and aim for transparency.
“There are ethical ways to cover crime, and there are unethical ways to cover crime. Legacy media has generally covered it pretty unethically,” the newly independent technology reporter Taylor Lorenz told me. “Crime content creators on TikTok are relying on some modicum of legacy media coverage, but the good ones aren’t just stopping there. They’re digging a little deeper, asking questions, and doing original reporting.”
Creators are working within platforms’ limitations, choosing words carefully to get around certain rules. That may mean describing a person who died by suicide as “unaliving” themselves or spelling the word rape “r4pe.” TikTok’s community guidelines forbid the promotion of violence, criminal activities, sexual abuse, and suicide and self-harm, among other things — though there are “public interest exceptions” for content that “is raising awareness or criticizing harmful behaviors.” Occasionally, the creators’ videos are removed.
“[Generation Z is] not watching the news,” Flores told me. “They probably get the news from Twitter or TikTok…It’s important to use the platforms that are working right now to get these messages and this information out.”
Flores studied criminal justice in college before she changed her major to fashion merchandising and marketing. After a few years creating beauty content (product reviews, makeup tutorials, unboxing, and hauls) on YouTube, she started “True Crime Thursdays” in 2021, delving into a different case each week. Her true crime TikTok has more than 1.8 million followers, while her beauty TikTok has 38,000.
Flores, who speaks Spanish, tries to highlight cases about victims of color and those from other underrepresented communities, whose families have a hard time getting the attention of mainstream media.
“Since I’m Hispanic, I understand [how differently] that community is treated when it comes to a missing person, a murder, or just any type of true crime case. I’ve talked with a lot of families who are like, ‘If my child goes missing, and I go to the police, they don’t care,’” Flores said. “[The police] just think it’s a teen running away, and when they’re finally like, ‘Oh, maybe something did happen to your child,’ at that point, it’s been years. All the evidence that could have existed is probably already gone. When I was thinking of my career, I wanted to do something that works with an organization that will provide funding for these families to hire a private investigator, or put [up] a billboard, or things like that.”
Flores uses public records, news reports, and other sources for her scripts. (Her sister helps with research.) She said victims’ families often reach out asking her to cover their cases. When Flores works with a family, she sends them a draft of the video before it publishes and asks them for any changes. In the published posts, she links to GoFundMes and other action items.
“I think the reason [families] reach out to me or other creators is because they know it’s way quicker to get a story out through me than through Univision and Telemundo,” Flores said. “Within a few days, I can get a video out, or a quick TikTok, or even an Instagram Story share.”
María Esperanza Díaz was a Venezuelan woman who was killed in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2022, two days after arriving in the United States. Flores said Diaz’s sister asked her to cover the case when the family back in Venezuela wasn’t able to obtain an emergency visa to enter the U.S. to identify Diaz’s body and bring her remains home.
“We were able to raise enough money through a GoFundMe for the family to come get her [body],” Flores said. “I talk to the sister to this day, because the murder is still unsolved. The family can’t be here to put pressure on the police. I’m working with them to try to figure out a way to keep the momentum going.”
The case of Dane Elkins, a California man who went missing in 2020, came to Flores when his mother asked her to make a video about him. According to Flores, Elkins’s mother said Dateline NBC initially covered the story, but then didn’t follow up.
@truecrimejackie Lets bring Dane Elkins home #truecrimetiktok #truecrimecommunity #truecrimestory #missingpersons #unsolvedmystery #unsolvedcase #ReTokforNature ♬ original sound – True Crime Jackie
“I think within a week of my TikTok being up, his mom got a message from someone saying they saw her son outside a Taco Bell, and she called the police,” Flores said. “They looked at the camera footage, and it was the son, so now they knew that he was in that area. That made me feel so happy…now they’re working within that area to figure out where he went.”
Flores monetizes her true crime videos, though she said she generates more income from her beauty accounts. Most of the money she makes from true crime content comes from YouTube advertising. In September, she launched a three-tier YouTube membership program, giving paid subscribers perks like early access to videos and subscriber-only live chats. She said she donates a portion of every monthly subscription to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but declined to specify how much.
YouTube reportedly pays creators in the YouTube Partner Program between $0.01 and $0.03 per video view on average. For YouTube videos with ads, like most of those created by Flores, creators receive 55% of the revenue and the platform keeps 45%. On TikTok, where Flores has posted 239 videos, creators can make some money by posting sponsored content and affiliate linking. Those with more than 10,000 followers can join the Creator Rewards Program, which reportedly pays between $4 and $8 per 1,000 “qualified views.”
“There is money to be made on TikTok, but it’s not the most lucrative platform,” Amanda Silberling, a senior reporter for TechCrunch covering internet culture, told me. “If you ask a creator if they’d rather have a million TikTok followers or a million YouTube subscribers, anyone who says TikTok is objectively wrong. Every platform has its issues, but you can at least pretty consistently depend on the YouTube Partner Program and their revenue split.”
Because true crime content often discusses abuse, violence, and death, YouTube and TikTok may reject true crime videos for monetization. Flores said that hasn’t happened to her on TikTok yet, but it’s happened to her with YouTube videos where she discusses sexual abuse of children.
“You can censor certain words, but at the same time, you don’t want to minimize what you’re talking about by always saying you can’t say certain things,” Flores said. “It feels like you’re not telling the full [story]. If you’re [a creator] getting into true crime videos, you have to understand your videos might get de-monetized. You probably aren’t going to make any money, which is why it’s important to have a backup.”
Some true crime creators wrestle with what it means to monetize real-life stories about murder and other heinous offenses. Are they profiting from exploitative content? Or are they elevating complicated stories about victims, and being compensated for that work? Of course, traditional journalists are confronted with similar questions.
“Newspapers and platforms have made money off of this [content] for hundreds of years,” Rebecca Jennings, a senior correspondent for Vox covering the creator economy, said. “Whether the individual creator is making money off of true crime content, you can bet the person who owns the platform that they’re working on is. It’s icky when we think of money going directly into an individual person’s hands. But this is how it works. Someone is profiting off of what all of us do, all the time.”
On a platform where grabbing the user’s attention within seconds is critical, Brielle Martinez has mastered the art of the strong hook.
“She was found burning in the backyard of an abandoned home and six years later, her family still has no answers,” Martinez began a video published earlier this month. “Today, we’re discussing the case of 20-year-old Melissa Runnels and I so desperately want to speak about this case because I truly believe someone knows something.”
Martinez, 23, is from a small town in Missouri and loves watching scary movies and shows like Criminal Minds. In a neighboring town, two young women, Kara Kopetsky and Jessica Runions were murdered by their ex-boyfriend, Kylr Yust, in 2007 and 2016, respectively. In 2021, Yust was sentenced to life in prison.
The case stuck with Martinez. “Why did it take so long to get this guy? Why did it take so long for someone to come forward with information?” said Martinez, who now lives in Nevada. “[I thought] about how long these families had to wait for answers. I wanted to share these stories and get the word out about who these people are.”
@brielletruecrime #greenscreen #mehereafter #truecrimedocumentary #truecrimefx #truecrimetok #crimetok #truecrimecommunity #truecrimeallthetime ♬ original sound – True Crime with Brielle
Martinez has more than 485,000 followers on TikTok and has posted 175 videos, ranging from 5 to 10 minutes in length; the most successful ones have gotten 1.5 million views. The videos often focus on closed cases, on one victim, or on multiple victims of the same perpetrator, and sometimes on the stories behind how a perpetrator was caught. TikTok is Martinez’s platform of choice because she doesn’t want to produce hour-long explainers suited to YouTube, nor does she feel comfortable squeezing a case into 90 seconds, the Instagram Reels’ limit.
Martinez finds some of the cases she covers on her own, and others through suggestions and requests from followers via an anonymous Google Form. Generally, she doesn’t interview sources herself. She begins each case with a search to see if the victim’s family has requested that the case not be covered; if she finds that, she doesn’t cover the case. To write her scripts, she uses previously published police records and court documents, TV news clips, and true-crime documentaries.
Martinez strives to point out discrepancies in her information sources — such as when a court-submitted evidence contradicts testimony from a witness. In one video last month, Martinez described conflicting perspectives on the 2011 stabbing case of Ellen Greenberg in Pennsylvania.
“[The police] claim that only Ellen’s DNA is on the knife, and she must have reached around and stabbed herself in the back of the neck, but that doesn’t really make sense to anyone, myself included,” Martinez recounts. “While looking into this case, I found that Ellen’s family consulted with many experts, and they all believe that this is a homicide. There was a finding at one point that some of these stab wounds likely occurred after Ellen was already dead.”
Martinez, who works full-time in social media marketing, said she doesn’t rely on making money from true crime explainers. But she experiments with how to increase her audience and reach and tries to promote engagement. She often ends videos asking her followers to comment with their thoughts and suggestions.
On the video about Melissa Runnels, one of the most-liked comments reads: “I appreciate the way you speak about this case. I know and love multiple people who struggle with addiction and it is so important to me that they are treated with respect and compassion.” Another commenter wrote: “Thx for not putting cheesy background music.”
Kara Robinson Chamberlain and Kimberly Corban are both survivors of sexual assault, and they’ve spent time in the public eye.
In 2006, at the age of 20, Corban was sexually assaulted by a man who broke into her off-campus college apartment. Chamberlain was kidnapped by a serial killer and escaped him in 2002. Her story has been recounted in news stories, documentaries, film, and social media.
Corban and Chamberlain’s cases have been discussed widely, online and off, which has given them a front-row seat to the problems with some true crime coverage. In August, for instance, Chamberlain’s TikTok followers alerted her to a video by Ray William Johnson, a true crime creator who illustrates stories with comics and has more than 14 million TikTok followers.
Johnson begins his eight-minute video by recounting Chamberlain’s story in an upbeat, excited voice: “This girl, her name’s Kara. And Kara is about to get kidnapped by a motherfucking serial killer.” At the end, he shows a screenshot of Chamberlain’s TikTok profile and says, “And today, she’s still thriving. She has a true crime podcast, and she’s got a pretty popular TikTok account, so good for her.” The video got 1.2 million likes, 2,900 comments, and 16,100 shares.
“You have people who present themselves as journalists, but really they’re content creators,” Chamberlain said. (Johnson did not reply to my request for comment.) “He didn’t ask. He didn’t make sure things are right. He put a screenshot of my TikTok, though. So everyone’s like, ‘But he tagged you!’ People will justify this stuff because it’s exposure.”
Compare Johnson’s TikTok and a 2021 documentary (executive produced by Chamberlain and another survivor, Elizabeth Smart) about Chamberlain’s case, where she’s the main narrator and tells her story. I found Chamberlain’s telling much more impactful. It’s chilling to see her, in an interview chair 20 years later, demonstrate how she shimmied a loose screw on her handcuffs to free herself.
Chamberlain and Corban say they don’t consume much true crime themselves (“We don’t need to. We lived it”) but see a space for content that centers the survivors. After connecting — and commiserating — through TikTok, the two teamed up to launch their podcast, Survivor’s Guide to True Crime, in January 2023. (Chamberlain has more than 795,000 TikTok followers and Corban has nearly 330,000.)
In each episode of Survivor’s Guide, the hosts interview a survivor. “They tell us as much or as little as they are comfortable with, but it doesn’t focus on the crime,” Corban said. “What someone else did to you is the least interesting part. We want to know what happened afterward. How did you come back? What are all the things that you learned? Who are you today?” The end of each episode includes action items — asking viewers to call their legislators or donate to a particular cause.
Survivor’s Guide has three Patreon tiers: Captive Audience ($5/month), Dark Humor “Afficianados” ($7/month), and Trauma Bonded ($15/month).
In addition to the Patreon, Chamberlain and Corban make money from public speaking and social media brand deals. They ask to be paid when they appear in documentaries or on the news. (“Agencies and networks need to understand [they’re] not compensating for a story. [They] are compensating for my time, my experience,” Chamberlain told me.)
They also make money from TikTok’s Creator Rewards Program, though payouts vary; Chamberlain said she typically makes up to $600 a per month, though she made as much as $2,000 one month. Corban, meanwhile, called the program “a dumpster fire.” “It used to be pretty great when it was rolled out to the U.S. creators, but that sharply declined once they brought about the ability to promote your own content with ads,” she told me. “I don’t even think I’ve gotten the $10 minimum to cash out [in the last six months].” She added, “I don’t create as much there anymore because content discussing sexual assault or abuse is immediately downgraded.”
On their podcast, Chamberlain and Corban can do things the way they want. “When I first told my story in 2007, I cannot tell you how many times I heard ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’” Corban said. But on the podcast, “we’re not going to sensationalize anything. These stories are sensational enough. The bravery that it takes for these people to come out and say these words with their full chest and stand behind them is unparalleled. That’s what we want people to find as sensational. And most people won’t sponsor that podcast. They will not put ads in. There’s zero promotion guarantee. We are grassroots AF.”
