Will TikTok down? Answer to why it sweeps over the world
Note: This article originally appeared on https://howsinchina.com/insight/black-horses/reasons-of-tiktok-went-virus.
2017 is a year for crazy growth of short video in China, more than 100 platforms sprang out, the MAU (monthly active users) in the whole industry exceeded 300 million. Many giants entered the market of short video platform in order to snatch traffic, among which, Kuaishou(快手), Miaopai(秒拍), Xigua Video(西瓜) formed three kingdoms. The competition was deadlocked, when all people thought that pattern had taken shape, TikTok came out as a black horse.
Since its launch in September 2016, only 1 word can be used to describe its development -- “lightning”. According to QuestMobile data, from August 2017 to February 2018, the DAU (daily active users) of TikTok jumped from 10 million to 65 million, just in Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) 30 million users took off, it’s almost doubled up compared with the beginning of the year.
Abroad market followed the pace, the meme continued spreading. TikTok hit 500 million global MAU in mid-2018 and became the most downloaded app in the Apple Store and Google Play. It may take at least 3 years for other platforms to achieve.
Since its birth, TikTok was on lucky day, raised millions founding at the very beginning, later ByteDance acquired Musical.ly to pave the road for going abroad. “When we do TikTok, we want to make a product of short video community which is suitable for young Chinese. To freely express yourself and play. Most the people are very bad at dancing and singing, if you want more people to participate, you need to make them cool easier. Offer better guidance, lower the threshold of using. All functions are developed around the goal.” said Xiaowei Wang, product owner of TikTok.
“Control your customers, not waiting to be chosen”
Marshall McLuhan wrote, “Medium is the message” in his book “The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects”, it tells us not content but the medium itself can change our thinking habits. In Printing Era, people indulge in letter; starting from Television Era, people have been fascinated by image. Letter encourages people to keep meditating, instead image asks people to switch attention constantly. Research conducted that now people can only focus on 1 thing for 8 seconds it reduced from 12 seconds compared with 100 years ago, it’s even shorter than a fish.
TikTok 15 seconds short video exactly fulfill people’s desire of finding a thing to spark their interests nonstop, just easily scroll endless videos until their heart stirred.
A heavy user of TikTok said “I tried all other short video apps but not for long. But I cannot escape from the gravity of TikTok. I think the most important reason is TikTok throws content all in one pack to me rather than allow me to choose.”
TikTok is very different from other short video apps. After opening the app, it starts playing videos directly, it doesn’t allow users to choose a certain category or view a video thumbnail. The type of video usually is which get the highest views, after you scrolling few videos machine learns your taste and pushes similar videos to you. Usage of short video changed from primary selection to passive acceptance.
“Create meme yourself”
Different from Kuaishou and Miaopai, the content of which is vulgar and rural, such pulp even appalling titles like “eating glass, 15-year-old pregnant girl, the 6-year-old tattoo” are common to see there. Users of TikTok mostly came from 1st and 2nd tire city, they have lots of ideas and innovations, applied lots of technique in videos.
Most users using Kuaishou is just want to see how these creators make fun of themselves. They share with friends in order to ridicule on it together, they would never participate in filming. The appearance of TikTok broke the superiority of this group of people. Many people changed their onlookers' roles and rushed into the casino to seek their own participatory pleasure.
In the early days of TikTok, it’s most girls and boys with good appearance were active there. They contributed lots of high-quality works, shaped the “fashion” and “cool” community tonality. Everyone in TikTok operation team was carrying the task of inviting KOLs, they dug quite a lot from Weibo, Musical.ly and Art Colleges, designed variety of themes and games, asked them to create content under this framework.
The presence of these KOLs and stars is a crucial step for TikTok's cold start. They labeled as local cultural, have mature marketing channels and lots of followers. Kinoshita Yukina, a Japanese artist with 4 million Twitter followers, is the first one opened TikTok account. Following her, singer Peng Weiwei, who has more than 5 million Twitter followers；E-Girls, the top three girl's idol group in the Oricon list; and the Youtube blogger Ficher’s, who has 4.5 million followers, became TikTok users.
It’s the same logic for the Southeast Asian market. On the day of launching TikTok in Indonesia, an offline party was held, gathering more than 100 stars and bloggers. A talent in TikTok said, “It gives people the opportunity to fully exchange their video creation experience, and more importantly, we gradually developed a sense of belonging and loyalty to the platform.”
In addition to designing challenges and games based on local cultural customs, the virus content on TikTok is actually globally linked, which can be quickly replicated, reduce the operational difficulties in each country. The operator will judge whether it is suitable for other markets, then push it to the global market, such as “Dance Machine”, “Dura Dance”, etc.
In order to cater to the Japanese people's "Respect for Commonality", TikTok released some game suitable for group challenges; during the traditional Thai festival Songkran Festival, TikTok also launched three holiday stickers. In 3 weeks, it downloaded more than 40,000 times.
According to the words of TikTok employee, to ensure users upload videos in high frequency and make it go viral, those videos that are easy to imitate and copy will be 1st considered to list in the top. This is one of the reasons why short videos of TikTok can often lead topics.
“Technique export, not content export”
Content export is never an easy task. Unfamiliar with local users’ habits and lack of understanding of culture are the trench in front of most companies. It’s the same question to TikTok, how to incite the seed users in a completely new market.
For all products of ByteDance, the most important thing while going abroad is to find a methodology that can be replicated globally. CEO Zhang Yiming positioned it as “Technique Export”. Strong technical output actually lowers the threshold for users to operate the product and dilute cultural difference to some extent.
According to the data of App Annie, in Thailand, a country of 68 million people, TikTok has more than 10 million downloads. The head of TikTok Thailand office said, “TikTok uses the same design and mechanism for all markets.” The technology used here is content creation, distribution, interaction and management, including the recommendation mechanism that TopBuzz(今日头条) are using. As well as video analysis and retrieval technology, automatic cover image selection, face and body detection technology and so on. This is still blank in overseas markets, and neither YouTube nor Instagram has so many tools and special effects in video shooting.
TikTok’s success greatly depends on the resource and techniques of ByteDance. Xiaowei Wang said frankly “With the support of AI lab, we have lots of opportunities to land our ideas, it's our unique advantages.”
There are two portals for TikTok, "recommended" and "nearby". When a video is uploaded, it shows to nearby users first. In the dashboard of TikTok, the rating is calculated according to the date of user's likes, playing time, and comments, then decide whether to push to more users. Regarding the subject, there is a certain matching strategy. Such as KOLs, handsome men, hot dance, life skills, prank, etc will be recommended to users alternately.
“High cost, high yield”
When TikTok opened the domestic market, they never considered about saving budget on marketing. An anonymous person revealed that TikTok spent 20 million buying traffic every day, the amount is 3 times bigger than what they spent during the Spring Festival. The effect of growth wasn’t disappointing, as of mid-June, 70 million DAU had doubled to 150 million.
There is a lot of disagreement about how much money TikTok has spent in the process of internationalization, tens of millions of dollars a month. A big percentage of users downloaded and tried to use TikTok because they saw ads on Twitter.
Through sponsored show “The Rap of China” in June 2017, the unexpected popularity let TikTok experienced the 1st explosive growth. Thus, TikTok invited a group of hip-hop singers to join and got the copyright of some songs. Besides, TikTok also sponsored shows such as “Happy Camp”, “Day Day Up” over $15 million.
An employee of TikTok in Japanese office revealed that “TV station of Japan doesn’t accept advertising, we have repeatedly told the producers interesting and valuable things on TikTok, and find ways to persuade them to report us willingly.”
Instead of showing videos in a closed circle of friends, TikTok pushes it everywhere. It means, the work doesn’t belong to the user itself from the moment of being uploaded, it becomes an entertainment product that all the TikTok users may consume. This kind of openness, on the one hand, allows all users to meet the nature of human -- “seeking attention”; on the other hand, it also greatly reduces the obligation of users responsible for their own works.
The Indian government ordered to ban TikTok because of potential harm to kids. This is in line with the Culture Industry theory of German Frankfurt school, culture goes opposite in industrialization, it no longer provides aesthetic value, no longer stimulates thinking. Instead, it becomes a tool to give people anesthesia, deceive people, thus obeying the manipulation. TikTok’s success, a business appears at the right time, right place.