Like many parents in the early months of the pandemic, Dave Ogleton was struggling. His business selling nutrition products was at a standstill. He and his wife, Jackie Megraw, were stuck at home in Devon, Pa., with their five (soon to be six) children, several of whom were languishing in Zoom classes.

To blow off steam, he started recording funny videos and memes about his family life and posting them on social media under the account @fitdadceo. People seemed to like them, so he posted more, with a recurring theme of “dad jokes.” (“I said to my son, ‘What do you call a group of crows that stick together?’ He said, ‘A flock.’ I said, ‘No, dummy. Vel-Crow.’”)

“Not taking myself seriously, especially in such a serious time, was freeing,” Mr. Ogleton said. His audience began growing, so he posted every day. “It was very off the cuff, but I think other dads saw it and were like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re doing that stuff too.’ ”

Today, Mr. Ogleton, who wears fitted T-shirts and a backward baseball cap in most of his videos, has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, along with partnership deals with Disney+, Netflix, Pampers and Procter & Gamble. He also sells merchandise printed with dad-joke phrases, like “It’s not a dad bod. It’s a father figure” and “I used to be cool.”

“I’m a full-time content creator now, and it allows me to spend a lot more time with my kids,” he said. “Just being around them gives me ideas. It’s a double bonus.”

Turning the camera on his family life also pushed Mr. Ogleton to pitch in more around the house (which, based on his videos, looks like a very normal suburban home cluttered with kids’ stuff). He hadn’t realized how much work needed to be done.

“Now I understand why my wife gets frustrated and run down sometimes,” he said. “As dads, many of us have a lot to learn and do at home, but I think there’s been a shift.”

Mr. Ogleton is part of a growing number of dad influencers — or “dadfluencers” — who have amassed sizable followings in the past couple of years. “Fathers have been gradually playing a bigger role in the domestic lives of their families for a while, but I think the pandemic really supercharged it,” said Cameron Ajdari, a founder of Currents Management in Los Angeles, which represents many dadfluencers. “It’s created a big appetite for dad content, not just from brands, but also from parents and dads all around the world. Dad influencers are making other dads feel seen in a way that wasn’t happening before.”

The rise of dadfluencers has also been fueled by the booming popularity of TikTok. “With Instagram, a lot of men were uncomfortable with putting up these edited, staged pictures and captions,” said James Nord, a founder of Fohr, an influencer marketing firm in New York City. “But TikTok has been a great entry point for a lot of dad influencers, because it comes across like you’re documenting your life in a natural way, and you don’t have to put yourself out there as much.”

Advertisers are taking note. “Dad influencers are a kind of Trojan horse for brands,” Mr. Nord said. “They are speaking to an audience that might not traditionally think of themselves as looking to other men on the internet for, say, fashion advice. But other dads are an easy entry point. And all of a sudden, here’s someone people trust and relate to, talking about new pants that they love. People might not even realize that they’re being influenced by this. They weren’t coming to that person for style advice, but that’s what they’re getting.”

Another reason that dads are curious to see how other dads parent is that they’re in largely uncharted territory, compared with previous generations. In 2016, dads in the United States reported spending an average of eight hours a week on child care — about triple the time that dads contributed in 1965, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

Dads also said they spent about 10 hours a week on household chores in 2016, an increase from four hours in 1965. (Alas, while dads are doing more, a major gender gap persists: Mothers spent about 14 hours a week on child care and 18 hours a week on housework in 2016.)

The pandemic was brutal for parents in general (particularly moms, data shows), but dads were less likely to have the support systems that women are socialized to cultivate in times of hardship (also known as the “tend and befriend” response to stress).

“Traditionally, dads haven’t really talked about parenting. My friends and I certainly didn’t,” said Thomas Piccirilli, a web developer and father of two in Monmouthshire, England, who posts under the Instagram account @the.dad.vibes, which has about 250,000 followers. “I think a big reason that what I was doing resonated was that I was honest and genuine about what I was experiencing.”

When Kevin Laferriere and Evan Kyle Berger, comedians turned stay-at-home dads in Los Angeles, started posting skits about parenting to their shared account on TikTok, @thedumbdads, in 2021, they were also surprised by how much dads responded. “Our goal was mostly to have fun and to use it as a creative outlet,” Mr. Laferriere said. “Then we heard from dads who said heartfelt things like, ‘I’m the only stay-at-home dad I know, and your content helped me feel seen.’”

Unlike some dadfluencers who lean into tired tropes of fatherhood — dads are hapless morons who can’t do anything, while moms are exasperated, overbearing multitaskers — Mr. Laferriere and Mr. Berger are intentional about focusing on the universal fact that parenting is hard, regardless of who is doing it. “You’re going to make mistakes. That’s where the ‘dumb dad’ aspect comes in,” Mr. Berger said. “But we’re not about the weaponized incompetence that you see in a lot of dad content.”

They both recalled a cleaning product commercial from their childhoods that depicted a mom coming home from work, clearly tired, to find her husband scaling a fish in the kitchen, proudly claiming that he had “dinner handled” as fish guts flew everywhere.

“Like, really? What picture are we painting of what a father is supposed to be? We don’t do those types of jokes,” Mr. Laferriere said. “We get enough material from being involved parents who make mistakes like everyone else. It’s healthy for us to talk openly about this stuff. Screwing up, looking stupid. It’s relatable.”

Also relatable, albeit more fraught, is dads complaining.

“There’s a lot of dads out there who are probably like, ‘I’m supposed to be able to handle this without complaining or without needing support,’” said Mike Julianelle, a content marketing manager and father of two in Brooklyn who posts about parenting under the accounts @dadandburied and @gottoddlered. “But I’m very much pro-complaining, and I do it constantly, publicly, all the time.”

He gets pushback for this. “I hear things like, ‘If you’re going to complain about your kids, you shouldn’t have them.’ But I think that’s total nonsense. Everyone deserves to get things off their chest,” he said. And finding solidarity is a nice perk. “I hear from dads, and moms too, telling me that I make them feel better.”

Mr. Julianelle isn’t the only one who has been surprised by the community that has grown out of his social media presence. Aaron Martin, a journalist turned stay-at-home dad in Miami, said that he never expected to make friends when he started posting Instagram videos of himself with his daughter under the account @stayathomedad. “But the more I started poking around when my daughter was napping or at night, I noticed a lot of other dads who were in similar positions, and ended up exchanging messages with some of them,” he said.

Since then, he has connected with more of his dad followers, and they’ve even gotten together in person with their kids. “At first, I did know any other stay-at-home dads. And growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, I didn’t really have any models for it, either. So it was isolating,” he said. “The moms had their group texts, and I felt a little excluded at times.” Now that he has built a network, he feels more confident as a parent, and he hopes to be an example for other dads too.

The world of dadfluencers is still relatively small, compared with many other influencer categories. But it includes a range of demographics. There are Christian dads (like Adam Busby, @adambuzz, with 1.3 million followers on Instagram), the “girl dad” (Joel Conder, a.k.a. @DadVGirls, with 1.4 million subscribers on YouTube), the “boy dad” (Devale Ellis, @iamdevale, with 2.1 million followers on Instagram), the gay dads (Jeffrey Romney Wright and Bryce Abplanalp of @growingupwithdads, with 21,000 followers on Instagram) and the cheerleader dad (Roland Pollard, of @rolandpollard, with seven million followers on TikTok). There are single dads, nonbinary dads, dads of children with special needs, dads with blended families and dads of quintuplets.

Of course, sharing your family life online comes with risks. Jonathan Joly, an influencer who started out on YouTube more than 14 years ago and now has 3.4 million followers on TikTok, weathered a backlash when he shared that one of his children is trans.

“When we learned our daughter was trans, we talked a lot about whether we could hide this from the world,” he said. “But it would be really hard, and what does that tell our child?” Ultimately, he and his wife, Anna Saccone, decided to post about their daughter’s transition.

“The things people call me, the things people say about me just because I’ve been supportive — it’s brutal,” Mr. Joly said. But on the upside, he added, “so many parents say to me that I’ve opened their eyes to things that they wouldn’t have known or accepted before.”

In some ways, dadfluencers are reminiscent of the early mom bloggers of the aughts; they’re speaking honestly about the trials of parenting in a public forum, and being met with a mix of judgment, eye rolling, empathy, curiosity and a kind of relief.

“I don’t want to be like, ‘Hi, I’m a dad and I’m so amazing. I get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and have a green juice,’” Mr. Joly said. “I stay up late every night, because it’s the only time that I get to be on my own, and I need time on my own. I like content where it’s about what other people do, but it shows the vulnerabilities of their parenting. And that’s what I’m trying to do, too.”