The life and times of TikTok

On 20th December 2018, I opened Times of India Mumbai and right there on the front page was a news of a local car crash which had claimed life of someone called Danish Zehen. The article further went on to say that Danish was a star on TikTok with over a million followers.

On any other day, i might have just ignored the news. I don't follow bollywood or cricket or celebrities. But the mention of TikTok really caught my eye. What also piqued my interest was the mention that Danish lived in a Kurla Tenement and came from a family of meager means. I realized that i was reading about a real life "Secret Superstar" who had been killed and he was big on TikTok.

I had never bothered to install TikTok

I knew what TikTok was, but had never bothered to install it. None of my friends had it. I had never read anything commendable about it. About a year ago i had installed some 50 apps and gone through each screen and only Roposo had made the cut of doing something notable. But Roposo had used growth hacking methods. It was showing an inflated user set. The engagement was not genuine. It has even made my profile automatically follow some channels and was using some methods which were not whitehat. You can see when a platform is trying to show more than it actually is, and i had quickly uninstalled it. I was a fan of their UI, but the tactics were off putting.

But here i was reading that toktok had made a Gully Boy into a star. A star so big that his death was the news worthy of front page news.

So I installed the app

Had to install it and check it out.

Install was pretty quick and it opened up with a GIF'esque video of someone just acting out a scene with a song playing in the background. Swipe. Smooth! Next video starts playing automatically.

I look at the screen for other interaction points, there are few, but nothing too layered. Everything reachable within a click or two. I can see why the app has appeal.

So i decide that this will have to be done over a weekend. The app seemed promising and I again came back to it over a weekend and this time i want to understand it completely. Whats making it tick.

What makes it tick

So, i am determined to kind of see the nuts and bolts and where does the app break. I keep swiping checking out the breadth of content, who are on it, whats happening, whats the style thats being promoted, how are the videos being sequenced.

I do some over 500 swipes. Every face is different. There are people in plush homes making videos, there are mother daughter duos, there's even a granny who has done something, there are people on street and in villages, people in huts.

The spectrum just amazed me, and so did the talent.

The app had captured people from every strata of society, virtually every age group and geography. Very few apps do this. I can understand youtube with massive backing of google and cheaper data doing this, but this was not promoted as heavily. I had not seen ads or PR fuelled articles to sustain its growth.

What's so amazing about this platform

What was really amazing was

1. It was essentially a talent platform, where someones capability to do something almost made it into a challenge. We had seen this in dub-smash, but this was on a different level.
2. It had reached the actual masses. In one video, the guy is showcasing his talent over a tandoor in a thatched hut kind of dhaba.
3. The UI was completely focused on the core, that was the video and to enable people to immediately made video and upload it.
4. The challenges not only made people make new videos, but the challenges themselves were made in such a way that you would have to use various filters and app features to compete. No other app had in my immediate memory tried to increase usage so subtly.
5. Most of the age group was young sub 20 years with a substantial part of these being girls. So in that respect, it was already competing with insta.
6. It was not a photo sharing but video sharing, which means it had convinced such a diverse set of people to leave anonymity and show their face. For most, it was a superstar moment.
7. The content was pretty decently filtered. I almost felt that youtube should have learnt something from this rather than sit on a high horse of safe harbor. There was no nudity, no coarse language. Anyone in the content business working with user generated content knows that controlling the quality is such a deep business. Since then i have read some news about content issues, but i still haven't been able to discover them. So probably it might be content uploaded but not boosted by the app and doing rounds via shares etc.
8. Most of the content was positive. There were some risky actions performed but more often than not, the set of talents focused on Mad skills, Building things, experiments, singing, dancing, acting, modelling, fitness and humor. The content didn't have to depend on pranks, nudity, controversy, abuse, politics and hate to be noticed. It was TEEN SAFE!!
9. The comments section was a little less moderated, but the involvement in the comments was much lower than views. Also it was hidden behind a layer. The entire UI was built in a way that you were more likely to swipe to the next video than actually pause and engage. The easiest engagement was to follow or like the video which could be done from the main screen and move on. So this was itself a kind of censorship.

After experimenting with the app for some time, i started asking people around me if they were on tiktok. I asked cab drivers, housekeeping staff, QSR chain employees, store owners and all of them knew. I checked office colleagues and college students and some of them knew about it but most of them had not bothered to install it.

Conclusion

For now, in my head, TikTok has become a gold standard for video based UI and experience. Their capability to reach a strata of India and convince them to make videos is astounding. I will let you on a little secret. When most people in digital imagine their customers, they don't imagine faces. Usually wide colored excels or Google analytics boards or facebook boards come into mind. So people might be saying millennial, but usually when they imagine millennial, they imagine an excel sheet with some demographic or a chart.

With this video app, i can imagine my users and customers better. I know how diverse they are. I can see their faces. No excel can help you do that. And once you have seen your customers and their diversity and their interests and heard them speak, that stays with you and makes your decision making better. And that experience is truly unique.

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References:

1. Danish Zehen : https://www.mid-day.com/articles/how-danish-zehen-became-a-star-so-big-that-his-death-has-made-him-more-popular/404811

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and don't represent the views of any of my employers present or past.

Satyarth.