Katie Kennedy posted a TikTok about Victorian women slowly poisoning themselves in arsenic-dyed green dresses. The video reached millions of views. Within weeks, a literary agent was calling.

The viral moment and the book deal arriving in the same breath was not luck. Katie had spent two years as a BBC digital journalist, was completing a history degree at Durham University, and had been watching other history creators convert platform followings into publishing contracts and broadcast work. When she launched The History Gossip in October 2023, she was not thinking about a revenue stream. She was thinking about several.

Today, at 27, Katie runs her multi-platform history brand with more than 900,000 followers, is a published author with over 25,000 books sold internationally, and has been included on the 2026 Forbes 30 Under 30 list. She has worked with Sky HISTORY on the series “History Crush”; the BBC and Audible; secured brand partnerships with companies including Adobe, Nationwide, Tesco, and Greggs; and collaborated with heritage institutions including the National Trust and Historic Houses. She submitted her final dissertation for her Oxford master’s this summer.

She is clear about what drives all of it. “I want to know who was shagging who and what scandals people are getting up to,” she says. For casual consumers of history, that’s precisely the hook a school lesson listing battles and dates will never provide.

What Two Years at the BBC Actually Taught Her

Before The History Gossip, Katie was a working journalist. Selected as one of 20 BBC digital journalists from more than 2,000 applicants, she was the youngest at the Newcastle office and the only candidate from the North East. She later moved into on-screen reporting and freelance work until COVID-19 ended the pipeline. “I did like it, but I didn’t like it enough to see myself doing it for the next 320 years,” she says.

She enrolled at Durham to study ancient history and archaeology, and by her final year was watching other history creators convert platforms into publishing deals. “Having a platform can open so many doors,” she says. “My family and I have no connections to the history industry. Everything’s very London-centric.” 

The calculation was partly strategic: a platform could give her access to an industry that typically requires connections she didn’t have, then allow her to pursue academic credibility on her own terms. She followed the Durham degree with a master’s at Oxford.

What the BBC had given her, she kept: how to write scripts for general audiences, how to structure a story under deadline, how to make complexity legible without condescension. On TikTok, those skills transferred directly. She didn’t need to find her voice; she needed to find the right format for it.

The Content That Changed the Plan

Her first TikToks, posted in October 2023, arrived in a fairly serious register. They were doing okay. By December, she had added humor, and the algorithm responded. “When I first started, I thought I had to present myself in a quite serious way to be taken seriously,” she says. “What I’m really grateful for is people really resonate with TikToks that are funny, because at the end of the day, you’re not lecturing them, and if they don’t enjoy it, they’re just gonna scroll.”

The format she settled on is deliberately unstable: a researched fact sheet, a half-scripted structure, then improvisation around the most scandalous details. “I’ll do a hook, and I’ll make it funny, and obviously it’ll be factual,” she says. “And then as you go, I’ll get more, like, factual with it.” 

Content about Victorians poisoning themselves in arsenic-dyed green dresses, about the Duke of Wellington abandoning his mistress to poverty, about the scandals behind celebrated historical figures, routinely reached millions of views.

By early 2024, a literary agent had approached her. She agreed to a book deal while still an undergraduate, structured it as a full-year calendar of historical events, and finished writing it at Oxford’s Freshers’ Week. The advance, paid across three installments tied to deal close, manuscript delivery, and publication, funded her through the Oxford master’s degree she had already committed to completing. 

“You have to take these opportunities as they come,” she says, “because they don’t happen very often.”

Brand Deals Pay Rent; Broadcast Builds the Profile

Katie is direct about the revenue hierarchy. Brand deals are the engine. The book advance helped, but it was finite and paid in stages. Broadcast work, which now includes the Sky HISTORY show, her BBC content, and an Audible original titled “Mistresses,” featuring Dr. Kate Lister and Jameela Jamil, builds her profile and credibility without generating comparable income. “With broadcast, you sort of think, ‘Oh, that’s where the money is,’ but it’s not,” she says. 

Merchandise is a channel she has set up but not yet invested seriously in. Brand deals, meanwhile, buy operational capacity. “Brand deals have really helped because they’ve helped me to be able to come down to London a lot more,” she says. “Then I can open up more opportunities, and then I can do more broadcast stuff.”

The geography matters. She is based in Durham, three hours from London by train, in an industry that remains intensely capital-centric. She signed with talent management company HLD after watching the agency position other creators in broadcast. “I’d seen how they’d taken creators and really elevated them to the next level,” she says, “and how they were able to sort of transform them into more broadcast opportunities.”

From the Royal Armouries to Greggs, Two Very Different Briefs

Katie approaches brand partnerships according to what each partner actually needs from her. When she works with heritage institutions such as the Royal Armouries in Leeds, the process is collaborative: she reviews their collections, identifies what suits her format, and submits a script for approval before filming. 

She describes a deliberate editorial exchange, a process of working out what’s genuinely interesting for her channel and flagging what isn’t. “I sort of say, ‘Oh yes, this could work for like my channel, or this is a bit boring, can we do something else?'” she explains.

Consumer brands require a different creative approach: finding a historical thread inside a product, a campaign, or a brand story, then spinning it into something native to her format. For Greggs, the Northeast bakery chain, she built content around the brand’s own history. “It’s a Northeast brand, and I’m from the Northeast, so I’d wanted to work with them for ages,” she says. For Tesco, she located a historical angle inside National Egg Week. The editorial logic in both cases is the same: lead with the most interesting detail, not the chronological start.

In either case, the risk is over-scripting. “Sometimes, brands will come up to you, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, we really love your content.’ But then they sort of pinch it and tweak it to the point where it doesn’t sound like me anymore,” she says. “Gen Z can really spot that a mile away if something’s too scripted or too corporate.” 

Her advice to any brand entering the space is consistent: “When brands get it right, and they sort of let you have almost free rein, that’s when the content does really well.”

Building a Historian, Not Just an Account

If TikTok disappeared tomorrow, Katie’s answer is immediate: her authorship, her broadcast profile, her presence on Instagram. The platform is infrastructure, not identity. “I want to establish myself as an author and a historian outside of the social media world,” she says.

The longer-term project centers on the stories that have been systematically absent from mainstream historical coverage: working-class lives, women’s narratives, and the figures overlooked by centuries of official record, like the Duke of Wellington’s abandoned mistress. The women behind celebrated men. The people who were there but didn’t make it into the books. It is the same instinct that drives her TikTok content, aimed at the person who wouldn’t normally think to pick one up.

The business she has built to get there is deliberately diverse, not because diversification was the stated goal, but because she understood early that a single revenue source is a single point of failure. “You’re always, like, ‘Where’s the next thing going to come from?’” she says. “I feel a bit like a hamster on a wheel. I sort of like it, because I couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else.”

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