Kriti Mehrotra
Born on June 24, 1993, to circus performers Olga Nikolau and Dmitriy Nikolau as one of their five children, Angela Nikolau has admittedly always had a keen interest in the world of creative arts. That’s why she dove head first into rhythmic gymnastics at the tender age of six, just to continue down the path until she was 16 before gradually starting to dabble in her other interests too. However, it has been the blend of her agility plus vision with her determination to scale the world’s tallest buildings that have garnered her true success, as explored in ‘Skywalkers: A Love Story.’
How Did Angela Nikolau Earn Her Money?
It was back around 2009 when Angela first kickstarted her career as an art teacher for younger children while still attending high school, unaware it would inadvertently help her later on. After all, although she graduated from the Christian School of Arts before studying at the Russian State Specialized Academy of Arts for five years, this job likely filled her with new ideas the most. So when she dropped out during her senior year in 2013 to pursue her dreams, she knew precisely what she was after — skywalking and photography that incorporates her gymnastics abilities.
Angela’s first notable climb was actually the Kudrinskaya Square Building in Moscow, Russia, followed by quite a few more in the city, and then she really started to gain traction in the mid-2010s. That’s around when she was contacted by fellow Russian roof-topper Ivan Beerkus for a collaboration, following which one thing led to another for them to become personal and professional partners. Together, they have scaled the Goldin Finance 117 in China, the Al Yaqoub Tower in Dubai, Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, Curly Tau in Almaty, plus Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, among many more.
Angela and Ivan actually create and upload videos of these incredible climbs despite most of their actions being illegal since they trespass, yet it has worked wonders for them over the years. In fact, this profession is what has enabled the former to travel the globe, all the while dabbling in entertainment too — she has featured in documentaries like ‘ On the Edge of Freedom’ as well as ‘Who is Next?,’ and even done some modeling work for popular brands like Adidas, Calvin Klein, Cartier, Formula I, Jo Malone, Pandora, and Samsung. According to the aforementioned film, all this helped her and Ivan make ends meet during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Then came August 2022, which is when Angela launched her first NFT collection called Freedom in the Sky, comprising a total of 50 NFTs that are direct, aesthetic images from her extreme adventures. Since then, her work has even been bought by a few big NFT art collectors, showcased in some of the most prominent NFT exhibitions across the globe, plus published in several other publications. Therefore, today, she continues to travel, create NFTs for a new collection, as well as pursue her other passions of modeling, entrepreneurship with a merch line, and most recently, painting.
Angela Nikolau’s Net Worth
Considering Angela’s diverse career as not just a content creator but also an artist, a teacher, a model, and a public figure, she genuinely has managed to accumulate a small fortune for herself. Starting with TikTok, since she has over 523.1k followers with 4.4 million likes, and the platform offers $0.02 per view with influencers charging between $200 to $500 per sponsored post, her income from here, under the assumption of 5 such uploads per month, is a maximum of $30,000 annually. Then there’s Instagram, where she has 724k followers and well-known creators usually request roughly $10 per 1,000 followers for a sponsored post, making her annual payment total $347,520 at four posts per month.
We should mention some of Angela’s ascent videos on Instagram have actually amassed millions of views over time, so she likely makes some additional money through those as well. Last but not least in terms of her social media platforms is YouTube, with her channel only having 1.38k subscribers with a total of 75,267 views, making her income via this avenue a mere $300 under the estimate of $4 per 1,000 views. Then comes Angela’s NFT sales, which is in the range of $210,000 per our calculations after taking into account the average of her most recent sales ($3,500) with the number of originals she has already released (at least 60).
There’s also Angela’s earnings through modeling, her merchandise line, plus her recent painting endeavor, the conservative estimate of which we believe is $30,000, $10,000, and $15,000 annually. It’s hard to calculate these since we do not have her exact sales data, yet we do believe them to be in the right range because we have taken all related factors into consideration. Therefore, upon combining these details with her likely lifestyle expenses, years of hard work, investments, as well as possible savings ($30,000 + $347,520 + $300 + $210,000 + $30,000 + $10,000 + $15,000, multiplied by three for her years of stable earnings, 0.5 for expenses, plus 1.5 for returns, we believe her net worth is close to $1.5 million.
Read More: Angela Nikolau and Ivan Berkus: Is the Skywalkers Couple Still Together?
