Musical.ly Star Baby Ariel Breaks Up With Boyfriend Zach Clayton

Teen sensations & Musical.ly star, Ariel Martin, better known as Baby Ariel, has called it quits with her boyfriend Zack Clayton, aka bruhitszach, J-14 reports.

Ariel and Zack posted matching messages on their respective Instagram accounts to announce the news of their separation to their followers. The pair, who had been given the adorable nickname of “Zariel” by fans, clarified that the separation was the result of their long-distance lifestyle and busy schedules. They maintained that they still cared for each other.

Baby Ariel first came to the spotlight about a year ago when a video she made of herself using the app Musical.ly went viral. Musical.ly, the music video-centric social media platform allows users to create 15-second clips of themselves lip-syncing and dancing along to popular music videos. Users can change the speed of the video, add filters, and play the video backwards before sharing it with others. Since its launch, the app has become extremely popular, having amassed a user base of over 80 million, most of whom are teenagers.

Ariel, 15, is one of most popular users of the Musical.ly app. She has amassed more than 11 million followers on the app so far. In addition, she also has over 3.5 million followers on Instagram, over 317 thousand followers on Twitter, and more than a million subscribers on YouTube.

Interestingly, she discovered Musical.ly when she saw a lip sync video posted on Instagram by one of her friends. She asked this friend what app she had used, and as she tried her hand at Musical.ly, she was instantly drawn to it, she said on her feature interview with Wonderwall.

“I started playing around with it, I added hand motions, I started lip syncing, I played around with different music and it all went from there. It brings out my creative side.”

The rise of social media platforms has helped many creative teenagers like Zach Clayton and Ariel Martin turn into celebrities. Through self-promotion, they have a chance of getting massive exposure, in many cases also earning a lot of money. However, like in the real world, being a celebrity on social media has its dark side. Apart from the constant limelight, these teenagers receive a lot of hate messages, most of which would qualify as cyber bullying.

The hate messages she had been receiving prompted Ariel to create the #ArielMovement, an anti-bullying campaign to support young people, and encourage them to stay confident and be who they are. She spoke about it in the same interview with Wonderwall.

“When I was first started on Musical.ly, I noticed that people were hating on me for making videos, for just being myself, for posting videos and photos on Instagram, Twitter, social media.”

“While I was getting all that hate, I realized that a lot of other kids would come to me and say “Thank you so much for overcoming it and for being a great role model, because I get hate on social media and I’ve learned from you because you deal with it in such an amazing way.” This inspired me to start the movement.”

Baby Ariel is currently on DigiTour, a traveling festival that brings the biggest social media stars to 28 cities across the country.

Ariel’s 16-year old ex, Zach Clayton, is also a star on musical.ly and has around two million followers on the app. But he rose to fame from his live broadcasts on YouNow. Clayton also has 1.2 million followers on instagram, 458,000 followers on twitter, and over 460,000 subscribers on YouTube.

Ariel and Zach began dating earlier this year and have collaborated on several videos. They also belong to a Youtube collabrative channel called our long journey along with other social media stars like Loren Beech, Brennen Taylor, Mario Selman, Weston Koury, and Nick Bean.

The split of the two social media stars comes just weeks after the break up of another social media celebrity couple: Loren Beech, 14 and Joey Kisluck,16, who had set up a combined Instagram account while they were dating.

[Image via Instagram]