Meet the British teen who has helped a staggering 7.4 MILLION lonely kids from all over the world study at home from her bedroom — via TikTok.
Blair Fiander, 18, started broadcasting her solo study sessions to the social media platform three weeks ago, as a way to motivate herself to revise for her A-levels.
She noticed thousands of teens were virtually joining her hour-long live group study sessions, which simply see her silently revising to camera.
Now she hosts eight scheduled study sessions every week, from her bedroom in Surrey.
Instead of teens meeting their pals in the library, tens of thousands of kids from around the world join her ‘live’ broadcast sessions.
Sometimes she offers tips on revision, and breaks up her revision with chats with fellow students, who are also studying from their bedrooms around the world.
In just three weeks since she started, her posts have gained a staggering 1,600,000 likes, her live streams have had 820,000 views and she’s gained over 200,000 followers.
Every day thousands of kids of all ages join her for study sessions, keen to have company while at home.
Her channel is called BlairsBrainiacs and she’s now created chatrooms for different age groups.
Blair, who is in upper sixth and hopes to secure a top university place next year, said: “The response is insane to me! If you’d said on the first day that this would happen I would be like ‘As if!’
“One day I had a growth of over 50,000 followers, but it has been such a blur I couldn’t tell you what day that was!
“I think that during the pandemic there have been a lot of young people who don’t have siblings who have been by themselves for a long time and that through this they have been able to communicate with other students.
“Nobody knows if we have exams or don’t or when they will be, but the channel reminds people that we are all in this together.”
Blair first went live on TikTok on November 10 to motivate herself to study.
She said: “It was crazy because the reason I started my account was because I was having a difficult day not feeling productive with my own work.
“It was the day after the second lockdown, the weather was miserable, so I thought I would go live on TikTok just to use the pressure of having people watch me to stay productive.
“I only had about 300 followers at that point, and was expecting maybe two of my friends to watch me work, but after I finished I noticed that 8,000 people had passed through!”
Like many teenagers, Blair had her TikTok account to make videos with her friends and of her singing.
But after the success of her first live stream she decided to rebrand and it’s now called BlairsBrainiacs and dedicated to studying.
After getting home from school she streams her study sessions twice-a-day Monday to Thursday, while she does her homework for her Biology, Sociology and Psychology A Levels.
She encourages students from pre-GCSE level right up to university to complete an hours study alongside her and the other ‘Brainiacs’.
Her second live stream on November 11 currently has over 1.5 million views, and a total of 7.3 million views over all her videos.
Her account has grown so much that she had to recruit help from fellow students to moderate sessions and build custom platforms that can hold large amounts of traffic.
She said: “When I hit 8,000 followers that’s when I knew it was going to be something quite big.
“A community was forming, and someone in the live came up with the name Blair’s Brainiacs to make it more obvious what we were doing.”
Blair goes live to stream her own studying and share study tips, but she has also expanded her student network onto the online communication platform Discord.
She said: “You can choose what level you study at, from pre-GCSE to university, and in what subject and enter video chat rooms with people studying the same thing.
“There are different ‘rooms’ which are either for quiet studying or for chatting and relaxing, and people can share resources with each other in the comments.
“You can see people writing notes and feel more proactive, and there’s always someone online chatting which makes people feel less isolated.
“There are also loads of written resources available like past exam questions and YouTube links that you can access through the site.”
Even with the meteoric popularity of her study group, Blair is still finding it easy to balance it with her own studies.
The A-grade student said: “I’ve had some mock exams this week, but it’s easy to balance because I do my own revision during my live streams!
“I don’t go on TikTok during the day and I don’t do weekends because I do need some downtime as well.”
Blair is applying to study psychology at Cambridge and UCL next year, and feels the work she is doing is fuel for her passion rather than a distraction.
She said: “Psychology is something I really want to turn to and looking into revision techniques for my TikTok is stuff I will be learning about in the future anyway.”
Blair receives hundreds of messages every hour from both students and parents thanking her for putting on the study sessions, and over 300 applications to be a volunteer ‘subject mentor’ to help with questions.
A group of moderators also monitor the content in Blair’s chatrooms and kick out trolls.
Blair said: “I’ve had a whole load of people saying they have gone up by two grades or passed a test they never had before.
“I would definitely love to keep it going because it’s so important, but with the rate it’s going I don’t know whether I will be able to twice a night- it’s quite a commitment!
“This time last week we were at a completely different place to where I thought it would be so its impossible to predict.”
Blair’s mum, Jo Fiander, 55 is “extremely proud” of her daughter.
The writer and social skills trainer said: “Blair is an amazing entrepreneur and has had to learn to delegate very quickly due to the vast increase in her followers and her unlimited ideas of how to engage and help others.”
Dad, Mark Fiander, 50, who works in marketing said: “Blair is a force of nature and I’m proud that she is using her various talents to help thousands upon thousands of students with her live streams.”