This woman owns the boyfriend demographic

How Depths of Wikipedia creator Annie Rauwerda made the leap from 'dying' Instagram to TikTok.

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Today’s mantra: "A cow lying on her side is not immobilized. She can rise whenever she chooses.” —Kate (who is still technically on vacation)

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You want 21-year-old Annie Rauwerda on your trivia team. The University of Michigan student studies neuroscience by day and plumbs Wikipedia, Amazon, and Craigslist for fun facts by night, as research for a suite of delightfully nerdy Instagram accounts that she founded. She launched the primary one, Depths Of Wikipedia, in the spring of 2020, and it has grown to over 368,000 followers thanks to discoveries of hers like “extreme ironing,” the “IKEA effect,” and “dishwasher salmon”—revelatory entries you'd otherwise only stumble upon after hours of aimless browsing when you should be sleeping (not that there's anything wrong with that).

Depths of Wikipedia’s own wiki entry would be peppered with unexpected facts. 

“It didn't have very many followers for a few months,” Rauwerda tells me in a phone call. “And then Caroline Calloway, she and I had very brief beef, and that got me a lot of followers. Since then, it's been like exponential growth.” Much of that growth is thanks to what she calls “the boyfriend demographic”: “It's like 60 percent male … mostly 25 to 35-year-old men.”

Rauwerda’s best friend from high school helps her juggle it all, running the Amazon and Craigslist spinoffs. Meanwhile, Rauwerda has taken Depths of Wikipedia to TikTok, where her most popular videos receive millions of views. 

In this interview for paid subscribers, Rauwerda and I discuss "bisexual lighting," PornHub comments, and what makes content shareable on Instagram—but why she had to move to TikTok, anyway.