There were also stars among the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left last year. Some made loud statements before leaving, someone left without too much publicity. At the same time, the majority of celebrities who left the Russian Federation are connected with their homeland not only by fans, but also by various assets in the form of business or real estate. But tiktoker Danya Milokhin preferred at the peak of his career to invest in himself rather than in property, without thinking about the future that brought him to the United States and left him without advertising and money.
Danya Milokhin is one of the most popular tiktokers in Russia. At the time of publication, the 21-year-old star has over 17 million followers on TikTok, 3.3 million on Instagram* and almost 120,000 on Telegram. He has come a long way from being raised in an orphanage to 42nd on the Forbes list of the most successful stars in Russia with an income of $1.5 million for 2021 and 6th on the list of the highest paid tiktokers.
Milokhin was born in Orenburg in 2001. From the age of three he lived in an orphanage, and as a teenager he was taken to a foster family. Closer to adulthood, Milokhin moved to Anapa and began working as a waiter.
In February 2019, he opened an account on TikTok, but he did not immediately upload videos to the platform. The first publications on the Milokhin channel appeared in the summer of 2019 and consisted of dances and sketches. The blogger’s feature was videos in which he jokes that he does not have a mother.
He received his first big money at the age of 18 – the state paid him 200 thousand rubles, which he spent on a fashionable smartphone and a ticket to Moscow, where at first he lived with a friend. Such a free approach to finance has become familiar to the blogger over time. In Moscow, Milokhin continued to shoot videos together with other TikTokers and advertise dubious “earning schemes” resembling a financial pyramid on his social networks. Such services generously paid for publications: it was possible to earn about 20 thousand rubles per day. Milokhin admitted that he spent his earnings on drugs.
At the beginning of 2020, the blogger had an overdose, after which he gave up drugs. In the same year, Milokhin attracted the attention of Yaroslav Andreev, founder of the WildJam blogging agency. They created a home of bloggers Dream Team House by analogy with a similar American project Hype House – several tiktokers move into one house and shoot content both for their pages and for the Dream Team House common account.
Andreev admitted that he was ready for the unprofitability of Dream Team House, but the project began to make a profit after six months. However, he did not name specific figures.
Milokhin’s own song “I’m at Home” about self-isolation due to coronavirus in 2020 was scattered on TikTok, and after that the blogger released a video for this track, which gained 16.5 million views. His career went uphill: he recorded joint tracks with Timati, Dzhigan, Nikolai Baskov. Milokhin was invited to various YouTube shows: Comment Out, Contacts, Musicality and federal channels. He appeared on the cover of GQ magazine and was nominated for the Man of the Year award. Advertisers became interested in the blogger, including PepsiCo, Honor, Huawei, Lenta. In 2021, Milokhin became one of the faces of Sberbank at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
For 2020, Milokhin’s brand advertising on TikTok cost from 200 thousand rubles, music – from 75 thousand rubles. According to Forbes, at that time the average monthly income of a blogger reached 2 million rubles. He himself noted that, in the wake of popularity, he thoughtlessly spent money on restaurants, branded clothes and “all sorts of nonsense”, but after that he began to manage his funds more carefully and planned to save on real estate, a car and new projects.
At the same time, in an interview with Ksenia Sobchak in 2020, Milokhin clarified that his earnings significantly exceed the Forbes estimate, but did not name the exact figure. He added that he gave a personal driver 20 thousand rubles a day for work, because he did not know how much to pay.
Scandals and lack of money
In March 2021, the blogger really bought his first car – a Mercedes-Maybach for 10 million rubles, which he pasted over with a pink film. Tiktoker lived in a three-room apartment in the center of Moscow, which cost him 210 thousand rubles a month.
In the same year, he and figure skater Evgenia Medvedeva became the “main couple” in the Ice Age show and took third place there. In the summer of 2022, rumors spread that Milokhin moved to Kazakhstan and even received the citizenship of this country, but the blogger denied the information, citing a trip to the republic to meet friends. By the way, other members of Dream Team House were also in Kazakhstan at that time. According to Andreev, he plans to open a branch of the WildJam agency in this country.
Kazakhstan, according to producer Andrei Timofeev, was not chosen by chance, since Dream Team House lost most of its earnings in Russia. “I think that their income (Milokhin and the team) sank by 90–95%, because all the advertisers who fed Russian bloggers were mainly from Western companies,” the producer explained. At the same time, in Kazakhstan “there are advertisers of all brands and there is money there.”
But Milokhin returned to Russia, starred in four episodes of the new Ice Age season, and in October 2022, unexpectedly for everyone, left the project and left the country. “I must confess: unfortunately, I left this show. Why? I’m just tired. I don’t have enough strength, I don’t see the point why I’m doing this. If there is no love for the work, then there is no point in doing it. I love Zhenya, I love (Ilya) Averbukh, I love all the participants. I didn’t want to let anyone down, ”tiktoker explained.
In November, he said that he was on the blacklist of stars “and now they won’t let him on TV in Russia.” The media attributed this to the situation in the Ice Age. A month later, Milokhin writes down the “answer” – “diss on Channel One”, where, with the help of a swear word, he expressed his negative attitude towards the TV channel.
In the same month, he became a “traitor” in the eyes of the patriotic media after he sang the Ukrainian anthem during a stream with Ukrainian blogger Artur Babich. In response to the accusations, Milokhin puzzledly recalled that he also sang the Russian anthem on the same stream.
All this only worsened the financial situation of Milokhin, who earned money in Russia mainly from advertising. According to former Dream Team member Marusya Klimova (“Your Marusya”), TikTok earnings fell by more than 30% after TikTok was blocked in the Russian Federation, and subscriber activity decreased by more than 50%.
On Wednesday, March 1, Milokhin, who lives in the United States, said that he “has no advertising at all.” “I earn zero, really zero. But I do have friends. I never put it off, I always spent,” he admitted in an interview with the Bugatti podcast. Tiktoker added that now friends are helping him with housing and food.
Milokhin also spoke about his biggest contract – Sberbank promised him 90 million rubles, but the contract was not signed because of the outfit of the tiktoker at the Muz-TV awards in 2021 (Milokhin came out in a shocking outfit, divided into two parts: male and female). “On my IP 70 thousand rubles. On one card – 200 thousand rubles, on the other – 150 thousand. This is all my money that I now have. I invested everything in myself, ”tiktoker explained.
And these words are far from coquetry. According to the “Company”, all property ever acquired by Milokhin begins and ends with the Mercedes-Maybach, which he sold in January 2023. And the business is limited to the IP created in June 2020, through which the tiktoker signed advertising contracts, according to SPARK data.