How TikTok Is Rewriting the World TikTok will change the way your social media works — even if you’re avoiding it. Hello, person who is, statistically speaking, a human adult aged approximately “millennial” to “boomer.” The analytics suggest a high likelihood that you’re aware there is an app named TikTok, and a similarly high likelihood that you’re not totally sure what it’s all about. Maybe you asked someone younger in your life, and they tried to explain and possibly failed. Or maybe you’ve heard that this new, extraordinarily popular video app is “a refreshing outlier in the social media universe” that’s “genuinely fun to use.” Maybe you even tried it, but bounced straight out, confused and sapped. “Fear of missing out” is a common way to describe how social media can make people feel like everyone else is part of something — a concert, a secret beach, a brunch — that they’re not. A new wrinkle in this concept is that sometimes that “something” is a social media platform itself. Maybe you saw a photo of some friends on Instagram at a great party and wondered why you weren’t there. But then, next in your feed, you saw a weird video, watermarked with a vibrating TikTok logo, scored with a song you’d never heard, starring a person you’d never seen. Maybe you saw one of the staggering number of ads for TikTok plastered throughout other social networks, and the real world, and wondered why you weren’t at that party, either, and why it seemed so far away. It’s been a while since a new social app got big enough, quickly enough, to make nonusers feel they’re missing out from an experience. If we exclude Fortnite, which is very social but also very much a game, the last time an app inspired such interest from people who weren’t on it was … maybe Snapchat? (Not a coincidence that Snapchat’s audience skewed very young, too.) Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times And while you, perhaps an anxious abstainer, may feel perfectly secure in your “choice” not to join that service, Snapchat has more daily users than Twitter, changed the course of its industry, and altered the way people communicate with their phones. TikTok, now reportedly 500 million users strong, is not so obvious in its intentions. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have them! Shall we? The basic human explanation of TikTok. TikTok is an app for making and sharing short videos. The videos are tall, not square, like on Snapchat or Instagram’s stories, but you navigate through videos by scrolling up and down, like a feed, not by tapping or swiping side to side. Editors’ Picks In ‘Tulsa King,’ Sylvester Stallone Tries Something New: Being Himself What if You Suddenly Won $2 Billion? 3 Thanksgiving Potato Dishes That Are Better Than Mashed Continue reading the main story Video creators have all sorts of tools at their disposal: filters as on Snapchat (and later, everyone else); the ability to search for sounds to score your video. Users are also strongly encouraged to engage with other users, through “response” videos or by means of “duets” — users can duplicate videos and add themselves alongside. Hashtags play a surprisingly large role on TikTok. In more innocent times, Twitter hoped its users might congregate around hashtags in a never-ending series of productive pop-up mini-discourses. On TikTok, hashtags actually exist as a real, functional organizing principle: not for news, or even really anything trending anywhere else than TikTok, but for various “challenges,” or jokes, or repeating formats, or other discernible blobs of activity. ► In this series of TikToks, @DonJuanFutrell goes shopping and reinvents language. ► In this TikTok, a popular song for memes is used to express shopping as a outsider. TikTok is, however, a free-for-all. It’s easy to make a video on TikTok, not just because of the tools it gives users, but because of extensive reasons and prompts it provides for you. You can select from an enormous range of sounds, from popular song clips to short moments from TV shows, YouTube videos or other TikToks. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things. TikTok assertively answers anyone’s what should I watch with a flood. In the same way, the app provides plenty of answers for the paralyzing what should I post? The result is an endless unspooling of material that people, many very young, might be too self-conscious to post on Instagram, or that they never would have come up with in the first place without a nudge. It can be hard to watch. It can be charming. It can be very, very funny. It is frequently, in the language widely applied outside the platform, from people on other platforms, extremely “cringe.” So that’s what’s on TikTok. What is it? TikTok can feel, to an American audience, a bit like a greatest hits compilation, featuring only the most engaging elements and experiences of its predecessors. This is true, to a point. But TikTok — known as Douyin in China, where its parent company is based — must also be understood as one of the most popular of many short-video-sharing apps in that country. This is a landscape that evolved both alongside and at arm’s length from the American tech industry — Instagram, for example, is banned in China. Under the hood, TikTok is a fundamentally different app than American users have used before. It may look and feel like its friend-feed-centric peers, and you can follow and be followed; of course there are hugely popular “stars,” many cultivated by the company itself. There’s messaging. Users can and do use it like any other social app. But the various aesthetic and functional similarities to Vine or Snapchat or Instagram belie a core difference: TikTok is more machine than man. In this way, it’s from the future — or at least a future. And it has some messages for us. Consider the trajectory of what we think of as the major social apps. Instagram and Twitter could only take us so far. Twitter gained popularity as a tool for following people and being followed by other people and expanded from there. Twitter watched what its users did with its original concept and formalized the conversational behaviors they invented. (See: Retweets. See again: hashtags.) Only then, and after going public, did it start to become more assertive. It made more recommendations. It started reordering users’ feeds based on what it thought they might want to see, or might have missed. Opaque machine intelligence encroached on the original system. ► This TikTok is a piece of unlikely yet sweet comedy about kids and vaccination. Something similar happened at Instagram, where algorithmic recommendation is now a very noticeable part of the experience, and on YouTube, where recommendations shuttle one around the platform in new and often … let’s say surprising ways. Some users might feel affronted by these assertive new automatic features, which are clearly designed to increase interaction. One might reasonably worry that this trend serves the lowest demands of a brutal attention economy that is revealing tech companies as cynical time-mongers and turning us into mindless drones. These changes have also tended to work, at least on those terms. We often do spend more time with the apps as they’ve become more assertive, and less intimately human, even as we’ve complained. What’s both crucial and easy to miss about TikTok is how it has stepped over the midpoint between the familiar self-directed feed and an experience based first on algorithmic observation and inference. The most obvious clue is right there when you open the app: the first thing you see isn’t a feed of your friends, but a page called “For You.” It’s an algorithmic feed based on videos you’ve interacted with, or even just watched. It never runs out of material. It is not, unless you train it to be, full of people you know, or things you’ve explicitly told it you want to see. It’s full of things that you seem to have demonstrated you want to watch, no matter what you actually say you want to watch. It is constantly learning from you and, over time, builds a presumably complex but opaque model of what you tend to watch, and shows you more of that, or things like that, or things related to that, or, honestly, who knows, but it seems to work. TikTok starts making assumptions the second you’ve opened the app, before you’ve really given it anything to work with. Imagine an Instagram centered entirely around its “Explore” tab, or a Twitter built around, I guess, trending topics or viral tweets, with “following” bolted onto the side. Imagine a version of Facebook that was able to fill your feed before you’d friended a single person. That’s TikTok. Its mode of creation is unusual, too. You can make stuff for your friends, or in response to your friends, sure. But users looking for something to post about are immediately recruited into group challenges, or hashtags, or shown popular songs. The bar is low. The stakes are low. Large audiences feel within reach, and smaller ones are easy to find, even if you’re just messing around. ► This TikTok is a great example of “Fake Plane Challenge.” On most social networks the first step to showing your content to a lot of people is grinding to build an audience, or having lots of friends, or being incredibly beautiful or wealthy or idle and willing to display that, or getting lucky or striking viral gold. TikTok instead encourages users to jump from audience to audience, trend to trend, creating something like simulated temporary friend groups, who get together to do friend-group things: to share an inside joke; to riff on a song; to talk idly and aimlessly about whatever is in front of you. Feedback is instant and frequently abundant; virality has a stiff tailwind. Stimulation is constant. There is an unmistakable sense that you’re using something that’s expanding in every direction. The pool of content is enormous. Most of it is meaningless. Some of it becomes popular, and some is great, and some gets to be both. As The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz put it, “Watching too many in a row can feel like you’re about to have a brain freeze. They’re incredibly addictive.” TikTok is just doing to you what you told it to do. In 1994, the artist and software developer Karl Sims demonstrated “virtual creatures” that moved in realistic ways discovered through “genetic algorithms.” These simulations, through trial and error, gradually arrived at some pre-existing shapes and movements: wriggling, slithering, dragging and walking. But some early models, which emphasized the creatures’ ability to cover a certain distance as quickly as possible, resulted in the evolution of a very tall, rigid being that simply fell over. In doing so, it “moved” more quickly than a wriggling peer. It didn’t understand its evolutionary priority as “creature-like locomotion.” It needed to get to a certain place as efficiently as possible. And it did. Older social apps are continuously evolving, too. Their models prioritize growth and discovery, of course, but also assume the centrality of your people: the accounts you follow and which follow you, or with whom you communicate directly, and are bound up in their founding myths and structures: Facebook’s social graph; the News Feed; the Instagram feed; Twitter’s rigid user relationships. ► TikTok is often used for showing off talent like drawing, building and “transformation by makeup.” TikTok though is the towering stick falling far and fast, not caring to wait to evolve through a wriggling, cumbersome social phase, but instead asking: Why not just start showing people things and see what they do about it? Why not just ask people to start making things and see what happens? If engagement is how success is measured, why not just design the app where taking up time is the entire point? There’s no rule, in apps or elsewhere, against engagement for engagement’s sake. Let the creature grow tall and fall upon us all. In What Laboratory Was This Monster Made? TikTok is far from an evolutionary fluke. Its parent company, ByteDance, recently valued at more than $75 billion, bills itself first as an artificial intelligence company, not a creator of mission-driven social platforms. TikTok was merged with Musical.ly, a social network initially built around lip-syncing and dancing and adopted by very young people. It still carries a lot of Musical.ly’s DNA, and its app store reviews contain more than a little yearning for Musical.ly’s return. It was the defunct Musical.ly against which the Federal Trade Commission recently levied its largest-ever penalty for mishandling the private data of young users. ► Press, twist and pull written on a hand are popular instructions to receive a message that is revealed to be written on the palm. “Almost got kicked out of my house for this one” claimed a user. “ByteDance’s content platforms enable people to enjoy content powered by AI technology,” its website says. Its vision is “to build global creation and interaction platforms.” ByteDance’s wildly popular news and entertainment portal, Jinri Toutiao (translated as “Today’s Headlines,”) relies heavily on AI — not human editors, or a self-selected feed of accounts — to curate and create customized streams of largely user-and-partner-generated content tailored to each of its readers. These are services where a sort of “filter” bubble — isolating users into worlds of points of view — isn’t an unintended consequence. It’s the point. And it’s extremely effective: Both Toutiao and Douyin have drawn attention from Chinese regulators for, among many other things, some familiar to any large social-ish platform, and others unique to its speech-constrained political environment, capturing too much user time. As a result, TikTok’s “Digital Wellbeing” settings include an option to enforce a password-protected time limit. The company’s other challenges can be addressed more assertively: an algorithm-first attention market isn’t just centrally ruled, it’s centrally allocated. Why Do People Spend Hours on TikTok? It’s the Machines. All of this goes a long way to explain why, at least at first, TikTok can seem disorienting. “You’re not actually sure why you’re seeing what you’re seeing,” said Ankur Thakkar, the former editorial lead at Vine, TikTok’s other most direct forerunner. On Vine, a new user might not have had much to watch, or felt much of a reason to create anything, but they understood their context: the list of people they followed, which was probably the thing letting them down. “It’s doing the thing that Twitter tried to solve, that everyone tried to solve,” he said. “How do you get people to engage?” Apparently you just … show them things, and let a powerful artificial intelligence take notes. You start sending daily notifications immediately. You tell them what to do. You fake it till you make it, algorithmically speaking. A friendly daily reminder to re-engage American social platforms, each fighting their own desperate and often stock-price-related fights to increase user engagement, have been trending in TikTok’s general direction for a while. It is possible, today, to receive highly personalized and effectively infinite content recommendations in YouTube without ever following a single account, because Google already watches what you do, and makes guesses about who you are. And while Facebook and Twitter don’t talk about their products this way, we understand that sometimes — maybe a lot of the time — we use them just to fill time. They, in turn, want as much of our time as possible, and are quite obviously doing whatever they can to get it. So maybe you’ll sit TikTok out. But these things have a way of sneaking up behind you. Maybe you never joined Snapchat — but its rise worried Facebook so much that its prettier product, Instagram, was remade in its image, and copied concepts from Snapchat reached you there. And maybe you skipped Twitter — but it still rewired your entire news diet, and, besides, it’s how the president talks to you, now. TikTok does away with many of the assumptions other social platforms have been built upon, and which they are in the process of discarding anyway. It questions the primacy of individual connections and friend networks. It unapologetically embraces central control rather than pretending it doesn’t have it. TikTok’s real influence going forward may be that the other social media platforms decide that our friends were simply holding us back. Or, at least, it was holding them back. Your phone is wild. Momo Is as Real as We’ve Made Her The real “Momo Challenge” is the terror of parenting in the age of YouTube. Here’s the truth of what we know. March 2, 2019 John Herrman covers tech and media for Styles and the Magazine, and was one of the first three recipients of The Times’s David Carr Fellowship. Previously, he was a reporter for the Business section. Give this article A Closer Look at TikTok The popular video app is changing social media, one quick video at a time. If you’ve constantly heard TikTok mentioned by your friends (and children) but have been unsure how it works, this latecomer’s guide is for you. The app is known for its viral dance challenges and catchy trends. But its algorithm has been blamed for amplifying misinformation and harmful content. Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok, instead of Google, to search for answers. Though TikTok didn’t invent the audio meme, it perfected it, turning replicable units of sound into a cultural currency as strong as images and text. Tariq went viral on TikTok for his love of corn. Now it’s back to business as usual: elementary school. RISE OF TIKTOK How TikTok ate the internet The world’s most popular app has pioneered a new age of instant attention. Can we trust it? on the night Shelby Renae first went viral on TikTok, she felt so giddy she could barely sleep. She’d spent the evening painting her nails, refreshing her phone between each finger — 20,000 views; 40,000 — and by the next morning, after her video crossed 3 million views, she decided it had changed her life. She didn’t really understand why it had done so well. The 16-second clip of her playing the video game “Fortnite” was funny, she thought — but not, like, millions-of-views funny. She wasn’t a celebrity: She grew up in Idaho; her last job was at a pizza shop. But this was just how the world’s most popular app worked. TikTok’s algorithm had made her a star. Now 25, she spends her days making TikTok videos from her apartment in Los Angeles, negotiating advertising deals and always chasing the next big hit. Many days, she feels drained — by the endless scramble for new content; by the weird mysteries of TikTok’s algorithm; by the stalkers, harassers and trolls. Yet still, in her off hours, she does what all her friends do: watches TikTok. “It will suck you in for hours,” she said. If you have not used TikTok, you are rapidly becoming the global exception. In five years, the app, once written off as a silly dance-video fad, has become one of the most prominent, discussed, distrusted, technically sophisticated and geopolitically complicated juggernauts on the internet — a phenomenon that has secured an unrivaled grasp on culture and everyday life and intensified the conflict between the world’s biggest superpowers. TikTok series logo Rise of TikTok The web’s most popular app has reshaped American culture, hypnotized the world and sparked a battle between two global superpowers. Part 1: How TikTok ate the internet. Part 2: Sorry you went viral. Part 3: As Washington wavers, Beijing exerts control. Its dominance, as estimated by the internet firms Cloudflare, Data.ai and Sensor Tower, is hard to overstate. TikTok’s website was visited last year more often than Google. No app has grown faster past a billion users, and more than 100 million of them are in the United States, roughly a third of the country. The average American viewer watches TikTok for 80 minutes a day — more than the time spent on Facebook and Instagram, combined. Two-thirds of American teens use the app, and 1 in 6 say they watch it “almost constantly,” a Pew Research Center survey in August found; usage of Facebook among the same group has been cut in half since 2015. A report this summer by the parental-control tool Qustodio found that TikTok was both the most-used social media app for children and the one parents were most likely to block. And while half of TikTok’s U.S. audience is younger than 25, the app is winning grown-ups’ attention, too; the industry analyst eMarketer expects its over-65 audience will increase this year by nearly 15 percent. (AARP last year even unveiled a how-to guide.) More than just a hit, TikTok has blown up the model of what a social network can be. Silicon Valley taught the world a style of online connectivity built on hand-chosen interests and friendships. TikTok doesn’t care about those. Instead, it unravels for viewers an endless line of videos selected by its algorithm, then learns a viewer’s tastes with every second they watch, pause or scroll. You don’t tell TikTok what you want to see. It tells you. And the internet can’t get enough. “We’re not talking about a dance app,” said Abbie Richards, a researcher who studies disinformation on TikTok, where she has half a million followers. “We’re talking about a platform that’s shaping how a whole generation is learning to perceive the world.” The Washington Post’s TikTok account has more than a million followers. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States regularly use it as a source of news. TikTok’s cultural influence on a new generation of media has led to some astounding ripple effects. Viral videos of people delighting in their favorite books, many of them with the hashtag #BookTok, which has 78 billion views, helped make 2021 one of the publishing industry’s best sales years ever. Books from the author Colleen Hoover, BookTok’s biggest star, have sold more copies this year than the Bible, according to data from NPD BookScan, which tracks sales at 16,000 stores nationwide. America’s biggest technology innovators are reinventing themselves in TikTok’s image, not only in developing short-video copycats — Meta’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts — but in swapping out networks of friends and families for feeds of strangers chasing viral glory. TikTok’s model could soon shape the entire internet. But TikTok’s ownership, by the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, has also made it one of the biggest pariahs in Washington. Former president Donald Trump tried to dismantle it. Top branches of the U.S. government and military have banned it from government-issued phones. And members of Congress insist it could be a Trojan horse for a secret Chinese propaganda and surveillance machine. Even as the app has transformed into a public square for news and conversation, TikTok’s opaque systems of promotion and suppression fuel worries that China’s aggressive model of internet control could warp what appears there. Many users already are self-censoring, adopting a second language of code words — “unalive,” not dead; “procedure,” not abortion — in hopes of dodging the app’s censors and preserving their chances at online fame. TikTok executives have argued they aren’t influenced by government agendas and want only to foster an entertainment platform that is fun and conflict-free. They have worked to soothe doubts and make friends in a hostile Washington by hiring U.S.-based specialists, promising transparency and piping American users’ data through servers in the United States. But former TikTok employees and technical experts argue that the company’s fixes do nothing to address its biggest risk: that its top decision-makers work in a country skilled at using the web to spread propaganda, surveil the public, gain influence and squash dissent. That crisis of trust has led to an ongoing debate among U.S. regulators: whether to more closely monitor the app or ban it outright. Many TikTok creators say speculation about the app’s Chinese roots distracts from the more grounded issues they face as a result of its explosive growth. TikTok’s ability to make anyone go viral overnight, they say, has meant that the anger and pressure once endured mostly by big influencers have become facts of life for the masses. Drew Maxey, a high school literature teacher in St. Louis, said he has gotten used to seeing glimpses of TikTok in class and hearing its sounds in the school hallways. It has become the main way most students socialize and pass the time; he’s even become a TikToker, gaining more than 50,000 followers with videos that use comic books as literary tools. Drew Maxey, a high school teacher in St. Louis, uses comic books to explain literary concepts to his more than 50,000 TikTok followers. He worries the app’s rules could be “training a whole generation of people not to say what they actually mean.” But he worries about how TikTok’s enigmatic machinery and students’ desire for viral attention have already shaped how some of them talk and behave. He’s started changing his wording, too; on some book videos, he won’t even say the word “death,” anxious it might stunt his reach. “Everything they need, they get from TikTok,” he said. “Yet we’re training a whole generation of people not to say what they actually mean.” TikTok series logo SENSORY RUSH TikTok starts studying its users from the moment they first open the app. It shows them a single, full-screen, infinitely looping video, then gauges how they react: a second of viewing or hesitation indicates interest; a swipe suggests a desire for something else. With every data point, TikTok’s algorithm narrows from a shapeless mass of content to a refined, irresistible feed. It is the ultimate video channel, and this is its one program. The “For You” algorithm, as TikTok calls it, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but from how they behave. While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify. The system runs on a sophisticated machine-learning engine — ByteDance researchers have championed its “sub-linear computational complexity” — but to TikTokers, the process could not be simpler. Launch the app. See the video. Passively consume. TikTok fans say they’ve been both surprised and unsettled by an algorithm that can read them eerily well, showing them videos they never searched for or even realized they wanted to see: One creator’s parody of an algorithmic flow chart narrowed from “teenage thirst traps” to moms and lumberjacks before reaching “videos only 10 people understand.” And few places on the web can match TikTok’s constant promise of surprise delight: If a viewer doesn’t like what’s on, there’s always another video, one swipe away. From the outside, watching someone use TikTok mostly looks like mindless swiping. But this system of serendipitous reward is the app’s backbone, and it turns entertainment into an endless game. Every swipe could bring something better, but viewers don’t know when they’ll get it, so they keep swiping in anticipation of something they might never find. It’s satisfying enough to keep people interested and so unsatisfying they don’t want to stop. TikTok tells advertisers that these “continuous cycles of engagement” make it more memorable, emotional and immersive than TV. A company-funded study that used brain-imaging scans on test subjects found that TikTok users engaged with the app about 10 times a minute, twice as often as its social media peers. “The TikTok audience is fully leaned in,” a marketing document said. The app’s infectiousness is so widely accepted that it’s become an inside joke. Videos with the #tiktokaddict hashtag have nearly 600 million views. One audio clip — a woman saying, “Like this video if you should be doing something else but instead you’re watching TikTok because you downloaded it as a joke and now you’re addicted” — has been pasted onto more than 70,000 separate videos and “liked” tens of millions of times. TikTok’s infectiousness has become an inside joke. Videos with the #tiktokaddict hashtag have been viewed nearly 600 million times. The average number of hours each American user spent every day on TikTok exploded 67 percent between 2018 and 2021, while Facebook and YouTube grew less than 10 percent, investment analysts at Bernstein Research wrote in an August report. TikTok has replaced “the friction of deciding what to watch,” the researchers said, with a “sensory rush of bite-sized videos … delivering endorphin hit after hit.” For viewers who’ve been scrolling too long, TikTok shows “take a break” alerts urging them to “get some water and then come back later”; scrolling past them has become a meme in itself. In June, the app started sending routine reminders to viewers showing how long they’d been watching; teenage viewers are now nudged to limit their TikTok time if they scroll more than 100 minutes in a day. TikTok’s mesmerizing appeal has made it effectively mandatory for modern stars like the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny, who in January got more than 90 million views on one of his first videos, in which he expressionlessly eats Froot Loops. Industries that once wrote the playbook for appealing to mass audiences are now desperate for TikTok’s viral boost: A new box office record for the July 4 weekend was set thanks largely to an absurd bit of TikTok meta-comedy — packs of suited-up “Gentleminions” mobbing the premiere of “Minions: The Rise of Gru.” The Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny has used his TikTok account to share new songs, dance routines and slices of life. One video, in which he eats Froot Loops, has been viewed more than 90 million times. But many of the app’s best-known names have become celebrities purely on the basis of TikTok itself. Khaby Lame, a 22-year-old former factory worker from Italy, has 150 million followers, 60 million more than Trump had on Twitter at his peak. Videos by Charli D’Amelio, an 18-year-old dancer from Connecticut, have been liked 11 billion times. The app flourished by making the creation of eye-catching videos accessible to anyone, with giant libraries of free music clips, editing tools, camera effects and augmented-reality filters in a simple, immersive interface. TikTok’s central “For You” feed serves up videos without context or dates, making everything feel relevant and new. And unlike YouTube and Instagram, where creators are forced to compete with established influencers’ polished productions, even the simplest, silliest or most spontaneous TikToks can become massive hits. Quick “duets,” “stitches” and “remixes,” where people riff off or react to someone else, are widely shared and given almost instant affirmation. Many use the app’s “green screen” feature — in which their heads float over a tweet or chart or video — to offer criticism or commentary in the style of a TV news report. TikTok creators, including Natasha Cougoule and Eli Rallo have used app video features such as “green screen” to present a new style of online commentary. For young viewers who see social media influencer as a popular career path, the allure is obvious. Teachers talk about students skipping class to record dances in the bathroom; Buddhist shrines in Nepal feature “No TikTok” signs. John Christopher Dombrowski, a Cornell University student whose TikToks about science facts have earned him 2.8 million followers, told the Information he’s paid his college tuition with ad-deal money from Adidas and Lancôme. “Social media is the new American Dream,” he said. TikTokers are increasingly using the app as a visual search tool; 40 percent of Generation Z respondents to a Google survey this year said they had opened TikTok or Instagram, not Google, when searching for nearby lunch spots. (One tweet in June, “I don’t Google anymore I TikTok,” has been ‘liked’ 120,000 times.) And as Americans’ trust in news organizations has fallen, TikTok’s role as a news source has climbed. One in three TikTok viewers in the United States said they regularly use it to learn about current events, Pew Research Center said last month. In the United Kingdom, it’s the fastest-growing news source for adults. (The Washington Post’s TikTok account has more than a million followers.) TikTok has been credited with helping supercharge book sales. Books from the author Colleen Hoover — popular with TikTok creators including Kendra Keeter-Gray and Sydney Blanchard — have sold more in the United States this year than the Bible. Thanks to its gravitational pull on creators and audiences, the app’s videos now encompass practically every topic on earth. There is fishing (#fishtok, 14 billion views), farming (#farmtok, 7 billion) and role-playing (#medievaltiktok, 4 billion). There are TikTok cops, lumberjacks, nurses and nuns. There is domestic bliss (#cleantok) and chaos (#cluttercore). There is #happiness (16 billion views) and #pain (76 billion). And, this being the internet, there are TikTok animals. The Chipmunks of TikTok account, with 15 million followers, features Bubba, Dinky, SpongeBob, Stinky and other chipmunks gobbling up hazelnuts; one video, “Fill the cheeks Squishy,” has been viewed more than 280 million times. Brad Zimerman, a 53-year-old karate instructor in St. Louis, said he started the account while out of work during the pandemic and now makes money through creator payouts from TikTok and YouTube, as well as from personalized happy-birthday videos on Instagram. The “Chipmunks of TikTok” account — featuring the mealtimes of Squishy, top, SpongeBob and Mooshy — has 15 million followers. “No one even knows who I am,” creator Brad Zimerman said. Zimerman said he doesn’t do brand sponsorships and declined to share how much he makes, saying only that he’s earned more money from chipmunk videos than his actual job. One influencer-marketing group estimated that, with his account’s level of interest, he could charge up to $14,000 per post. “I get thousands of offers to do deals with my chipmunks,” he said. “No one even knows who I am.” TikTok series logo INDUSTRIALIZING VIRALITY After cornering the market on entertainment, TikTok began offering its model of behavioral tracking and algorithmic suggestion to advertisers, promising them a way to know which ads people find most compelling without having to ask. It was an instant hit: The company’s ad revenue tripled this year, to $12 billion, according to eMarketer estimates, and is expected to eclipse YouTube at nearly $25 billion by 2025. In the United States, the cost to advertisers for TikTok’s premium real estate — the first commercial break a viewer sees in their feed, known as a “TopView” — has jumped to $3 million a day. Beyond traditional marketing, TikTok has rapidly industrialized the way companies pay young people to hawk their stuff. TikTok runs a giant catalogue of people, the Creator Marketplace, that companies can use to sort creators by their interests and follower counts; the service is invite-only, and creators have to post frequently if they want the chance to get paid. Influencers paid to promote goods in their videos now make more ad money on TikTok than Facebook: roughly $750 million, U.S. estimates from Insider Intelligence show. (Instagram, which beats both of them, this summer debuted its own “Creator Marketplace” clone.) TikTok also takes a cut of the virtual tips, or “Video Gifts,” that fans pay to creators with its central currency of TikTok “coins.” Displayed online as neon roses and doughnuts, this economy now rivals that of a small nation: In the past three months, TikTokers spent more than $900 million inside the app — the highest quarterly spending for any app in history. TikTok’s diverse creator base has made the app into a showcase for radical self expression. It’s also inspired jealousy inside Facebook, where bored users are leaving en masse. At a time when Silicon Valley’s stock prices are crumbling, TikTok’s success has triggered deep jealousy — especially for Facebook, which in February reported it had lost users for the first time in its 18-year history. (The top link on all of Facebook in the second quarter of this year was TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta said.) Meta tried beating TikTok by hiring a Republican lobbying firm to undertake a secretive letter-writing and lobbying campaign calling it the “real threat” to America’s teens. But by the summer, Meta ended up just copying TikTok’s style, ditching its focus on people’s friends and families and swapping in computer-selected unknowns. Not everyone was happy about it. On internal message boards, employees have griped that Facebook is abandoning its strengths, such as “the social graph and human choice.” The celebrity socialite Kylie Jenner told her 360 million Instagram followers the company should “stop trying to be” TikTok. But there are some early signs that these copycats are succeeding. YouTube said in June that its Shorts service was being watched by 1.5 billion users every month — beating the 1 billion user count TikTok reported last fall. TikTok, however, seems bent on taking on a wider range of digital life. It’s tested features for interactive minigames and job résumés. It started selling concert tickets. It built a live-streaming business used for meal-cooking showcases, lottery scratch-offs, tarot readings and apartment tours. And it tested a shopping feature that would let viewers buy products from QVC-style live streams in a few quick taps. Even without that expansion, there can be no denying that TikTok has become a world-shaping force of its own — so colorful and compelling that many viewers find it hard to quit. That’s even the case in Russia, where the company, abiding by Kremlin directives, has blocked everyday Russians from posting new TikToks or seeing any videos from outside the country since the Russian military invaded Ukraine. The TikTok people watch in Russia has become its own parallel universe, frozen in time — an endless stream of old Russian videos and pro-Kremlin propaganda. But many young Russians continue to use it “quite actively” nearly eight months into the war, said a few who spoke with The Post on the condition of anonymity because of the country’s draconian speech laws. Some teens said they use technical workarounds to see foreign TikToks, risking punishment for a glimpse of the outside world. But one 18-year-old said he just settles for watching whatever the algorithm shows. “Yes, all videos are old,” he said. “But it’s still enough.” Will Oremus, Natalia Abbakumova and Taylor Lorenz contributed to this report. ...
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tag What is TikTok? Why Is It So Popular? By Daniel | May 24, 2022 (12 min read) MARKETING | PHOTOGRAPHY | SOCIAL MEDIA | TRENDS Every few years, a new app redefines the way we use social media. In 2022, TikTok the video-sharing social media platform is the current most popular app in the world. The kids love it. Adults don’t understand it. But there’s no denying its popularity. Like it or not, there is a great migration that happens with social media as new platforms capture the zeitgeist of culture. They offer newer and more unique ways to interact. The mass adoption of new social media platforms flows through continuous cycles. From Myspace in 2005, moving to Facebook in 2008, and then to Instagram (with a brief interlude by Snapchat) in about 2014. The move to a new social platform is always reluctant, but eventually, the popularity of the platform coerces us all to join. In 2022, the mobile app TikTok is the current ruler. What is TikTok? A mix of music, lip sync videos, comedy, and micro-blog content, TikTok is not an easy platform to understand at first glance. It has even led to the growth of the competitor platform Triller, which aims to take some of the attention away from the app. TikTok is still undiscovered territory for anyone over the age of 25. Extremely popular with Gen Z , TikTok is a glimpse into what it means to be growing up in today’s hyper-connected world. The vast majority of users on Facebook today at aged 40 plus , while Instagram is more popular with users aged 20-40. In this article, we will look at the history of TikTok, who owns TikTok, and how users and advertisers are benefitting from the platform. tiktok app - most downloaded app 2020 The TikTok app is the most popular social media app in 2022. It has been in the top app downloads since 2018. TikTok Statistics to Know in 2022 As of January 2022, TikTok has over 3 Billion downloads and over 1 Billion monthly users TikTok was the most popular app downloaded globally in 2020 and 2021 60 percent of TikTok users are between the ages of 16 and 24 Almost 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34 The TikTok app reach is worldwide with users in over 150 countries The average user spends 52 minutes per day on the TikTok app Bytedance the company that owns TikTok is valued at $140 Billion, making it the world’s most valuable startup and making the company worth more than Twitter and Coca Cola. TikTok reports that it has over 80 million monthly active users in the United States. 60% are female, 40% are male. Musically-tiktok Musical.ly was a popular lip-syncing app until it was acquired and merged into TikTok in 2017. Who Invented TikTok? In 2014, a social media app named Musical.ly (pronounced Musical-ly) became incredibly popular with the 13-18 year old demographic. The main purpose of Musical.ly was user-generated videos that combined popular songs with videos from the users (often called Musers). The most popular use of the app was to create videos where they were lip-syncing and dancing. By mid-2017, the Musical.ly app had over 200 Million users. In 2016, Chinese app developer ByteDance created an app named Douyin, a rival to Musical.ly. Launched initially only in China, the app was renamed and rebranded to TikTok for better international appeal. Within a year, the TikTok app had more than 100 million users, and the popularity of lip sync videos continued to rise. In late 2017, Musical.ly was acquired by ByteDance for a fee of $800 Million. In 2018, Bytedance consolidated the user accounts of Musical.ly and TikTok, merging the two apps into one under the name TikTok. With this unified brand and user base, the app began to increase in popularity very quickly. TikTok became the most downloaded app on the Apple App store in early 2018, surpassing Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube. As of July 2019, TikTok has over 500million total installs on the Google Play Store. Who Uses TikTok? TikTok is named Douyin in China, and currently has a userbase of over 250 Million users. In the rest of the world, the app is called TikTok and is available in 154 countries worldwide. Currently, 40% of TikTok users are located outside China. India has a particularly large user base and accounts for approximately 25% of app downloads to date. As of March 2019, the userbase of TikTok in the US was approximately 14 Million. The 2019 Internet Trends Report revealed that China internet users spent more than 600 million hours per day watching short videos. As of 2022, TikTok usage continues to grow and the TikTok app is a dominant force in the social media world. Why us tiktok so popular? TikTok offers short-form video content for over 500 Million users around the world. Short Form Video Entertainment When you open TikTok, a whirlwind of amateur and professional videos greet you. Most of the videos are music, comedy, or some sort of TikTok challenge related content. Many users use the video-sharing platform to express themselves and share their life in some unique way. For anyone over the age of 20, this content has no relevance. But to those in the age demographic, it can garner millions of views and followers. Perhaps the hardest part of understanding TikTok is the shortness of the content. TikTok primarily shows video content that is 15 seconds in length. While there is an option to share videos up to one minute long, there is no longer-form video, and no image or text sharing options. These restrictions make the app harder to comprehend the first few times you use it. Catering To Variety As of 2022, TikTok has been downloaded over 3 billion times. As the platform is growing, it is evolving and capturing the interest of both brands and celebrities. In late 2020, dancer Charli D’Amelio became the first person to earn 100 million followers on TikTok, and currently has over 141 million followers. Other influencers such as entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck have also adopted the platform and have been sharing repurposed content that is more relevant to the demographic. The biggest draw of TikTok is the ability to post about anything. Humor, hobbies, fitness, travel, music, photography, dance; every category is open and gaining huge attention. Each area is offering exposure for those that can adapt their content to the short-form video model. While entertainment seems to be the main draw at the moment, there is an increase in both educational, aspirational, and business-oriented content. What’s The Point of TikTok? When a new app emerges on the market and starts to grow in popularity, it can be hard to understand why it’s needed. Instagram, for several years, seemed like a simple photo filter app but slowly emerged into a social platform and branding tool. Snapchat stories initially seemed ridiculous, but as they grew in popularity, Instagram essentially stole the idea, and Instagram Stories now dominate the social network. Twitter, with its confusing hashtag system, eventually became a new way to track news and current events. When it comes to TikTok, there is a vast market of people looking for micro-entertainment and distraction for a few minutes during the day. If a video is interesting or appealing, it is reshared quickly by the algorithm on the ‘For You’ page and gains millions of views. How Does TikTok Work? Anybody with a TikTok account can create video content that includes music, special filters, and even visual effects. The aim is to create videos that grab users interest within the first few seconds to stop them scrolling and pay attention. The more a user spends time on a specific TikTok creator video, the more likely it is to become viral. The TikTok For You Page is the most popular section of TikTok and is the place where users discover new content that is served up by the TikTok Algorithm. Whenever a TikTok user opens the app, the first page they see is the For You Page. Similar to apps such as Twitter and Instagram, much of TikTok’s platform is guided by what’s trending, and hashtags that allow users to find content. tiktok foryoupage On most popular TikTok videos, you’re likely to see hashtags such as #Foryou, #ForYouPage, and #FYP. These particular hashtags tell the TikTok algorithm that this content is intended to be shared with others. How Safe is TikTok? Using any social network can be risky, but it’s possible for kids to safely use the app with adult supervision (and a private account). When you sign up for TikTok, your account is public by default, meaning anyone can see your videos, send you direct messages, and use your location information. Parents should make sure to turn on all privacy settings for accounts kids are using, so only people you know can interact with your videos or message you on the app. That means either opting for a private account or changing the settings for comments, duets, reactions, and messages to “Friends” instead of “Everyone.” You can also turn those features off completely. tiktok restricted mode tiktok family pariing TikTok introduced new settings Digital Wellbeing, and also the ability to do Family Pairing for user accounts. What Are the Dangers of TikTok? As the social media platform has grown, there have of course been concerns about the dangers of TikTok. The overwhelming majority of TikTok users are identified as Gen Z, between the ages of 14 to 24 years old. Because of this, many parents feel a responsibility to understand the dangers of inappropriate content on TikTok and to teach their children to be safe and aware online. According to TikTok’s community guidelines, the video sharing app is “deeply committed” to child safety and has “zero tolerance” for behaviour that could lead to child abuse or sexual exploitation. In February 2020, TikTok announced a new set of parental controls, called “Family Safety Mode”. TikTok’s Family Safety Mode is designed to let parents set limits on their children’s use of the social media app. The parental control features include limits on direct messages, screen-time management, and a ‘restricted mode’ that limits the appearance of inappropriate content. The restricted mode on TikTok allows an active user to switch to a private account you can approve (or deny) new follower requests. A private TikTok account only allows an active user you’ve approved to see your content. By default, your TikTok account starts as public. This allows TikTok to share your videos, other users post comments, reactions, or create short video duets with the content you’ve created. tiktok oracle purchase In 2020, ByteDance made a $12 Billion deal to sell the subsidiary TikTok Global to Oracle and Walmart in the US. Why Was TikTok Almost Banned? The TikTok app is the first Chinese app to gain massive popularity in the United States. This huge growth in popularity led to concerns that the data collected by ByteDance was being stored by the Chinese government. In January 2020, the U.S. military banned TikTok from government-issued phones. In August 2020, there was a growing concern from U.S. President Donald Trump that the Chinese Government was gathering user data that could potentially threaten the national security of the United States. The President then signed an executive order that would potentially ban TikTok if the Chinese app was not sold by ByteDance to a US company with 45 days. Trump also then signed a similar order against the WeChat application which is owned by the Chinese company Tencent. The Trump administration then issued a new executive giving ByteDance 90 days to sell or spin off ownership of the U.S. TikTok business. Initially Microsoft was in the running with an offer of $50 Billion to take ownership of the US TikTok business. In September 2020, ByteDance made a tentative $12 Billion deal to create a US subsidiary called TikTok Global. This new TikTok subsidiary would be part-owned by the US companies Oracle and Walmart. With the new deal in place, Oracle and Walmart will own 20% of the new company, ByteDance says will still own 80%. Although it appears that ownership of the US business will give control of the data collection for the TikTok content, the actual process is still unclear. How To Use TikTok for Marketing While the average TikTik creator is part of Gen Z, TikTok is now beginning to attract a wider user base. According to recent studies, nearly 38% of TikTok’s users within the US are above 30. If you own a business, TikTok marketing could potentially be a great channel for your brand. Even in 2020, there is relatively little business competition on the social platform among small to medium-sized companies. You might think of TikTok for business as similar to using Instagram Stories. They are not meant to push for sales, but rather show the personality of your business. tiktok-branded-hashtag-challenge Some businesses such as Zalora have sponsored a branded hashtag challenge to encourage users to create content. A great first TikTok video for business owners is to introduce yourself and your business. Remember that the more personal your business feels, the more people will relate to it. Tiktok Marketing is not about trying to sell, but about building brand trust. Simply sharing fun facts about your team and a little about your business helps people become familiar with you. Another excellent tactic is to share your brand missions, what’s most important to your small business. This helps your potential customers understand what drives your business. Another way to market your business on TikTok is to partner with an influencer. The rise of the TikTok influencer shows that people on the platform value the content they are creating. Every regular TikTik user will have a favorite content creator. You can look at the current hashtag challenge that is popular and see if there is a TikTok influencer that you can partner with. These are often known as a branded hashtag challenge, where a business will sponsor a hashtag and challenge users to create content around the theme. According to data from TikTok, over 50% of creators have participated in at least one hashtag challenge. The average engagement on a branded hashtag challenge for a TikTok influencer is 8.5%. Considering a user base of over 80 million people in the US, that is a considerable TikTok marketing opportunity. How Brands Are Using TikTok The NBA has always been an early adopter of online content and joined TikTok early. With over 13 Million followers, the NBA share highlights of games and celebrity player cameos. The NFL is following suit with 6.5 Million followers and growing. Fast food restaurant Chiptole has been another early adopter on the platform. The majority of their content celebrates the foods they serve, but they also run popular competitions for TikTok users to submit fun videos at the locations. Media companies such as The Washington Post and NBC are using TikTok to give previews of their content and to showcase their reporters’ personalities through behind-the-scenes videos. Brands on TikTok Brands that have adopted TikTok early are reaping the rewards of high engagement. How to Advertise on TikTok In early 2019, TikTok began rolling out advertisements to some viewers on the platform. And it’s proven to be a big success for the company. Reports from TechCrunch/Apptopia show that TikTok’s Q4 2019 revenue grew over 300% from the same period a year earlier. A TikTok ad is a pre-roll (similar to the ads before a youtube video) and last for between 10-15 seconds. Similar to youtube, the ads can be skipped within a few seconds, and advertisers pay for impressions. There are currently three types of ads available on TikTok: Brand Takeover Ads Full-screen five-second static or animated ads that appear when a user first opens the TikTok app. These brand takeover ads direct the users to a webpage or TikTok account. This ad type has a limited number of advertisers per day in each country and can reportedly cost up to $50,000 per campaign. In-Feed Native Video Ads Auto-playing full-screen ads that show up between videos of user-generated content. Similar to Instagram story ads, these ads will link the users to a landing page or an app store. Branded Hashtag Challenges These are themes generated by brands or businesses associated with a promoted hashtag. The goal is to entice users to create videos around the theme and share. These videos are part of a brand takeover ad or in-feed native ad packages. Running ads on the TikTok app requires applying as the service is still being tested, and for this reason, there is no accurate data on TikTok advertising rates. Some agencies report that TikTok in-feed ads are sold at $10 cost-per-impression, and require $6,000 minimum campaign spend. According to TikTok, over 90% of users on the platform visits several times a day, making it appealing for companies whose demographics match the TikTok audience. Can You Make Money on TikTok? Currently, there is no direct way for TikTok users to capitalize on their popularity through the app. As the volume of views is incredibly high, most users will ask their audience to visit other platforms or websites to monetize. TikTok creators are able to share their Instagram and Youtube links in their profile, which makes it easier to gain crossover followers. For TikTok influencers, the main goal is to gain enough traction and followers to partner with brands and other media outlets. The main goal for brands on TikTok is engagement and attracting a new audience. While legacy brands do this well, it is not clear whether smaller companies can draw the same following on the platform. The evolution of mobile marketing on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat has shown that anything is possible with the right audience. For anyone with a business or personal brand that produces video content, TikTok is worth joining and experimenting with. Every TikTok statistic points towards its continued growth into 2022 and beyond. As the TikTok app grows towards maturity, its ability to offer advertising and promotion opportunities will likely become a bigger part of the ways companies market online. Want to grow your influence and reach on social media? Brandastic is a digital marketing agency with offices in Orange County, Los Angeles, and Austin. We specialize in creating marketing campaigns that impact and increase revenue for your business. Contact us today to see how we can help you grow. ........
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tag What is TikTok? – Everything You need to Know in 2022 by Werner Geyser Last Updated: August 3rd, 2022 8 min read Influencer Marketing Musical.ly was a popular short-form (15 seconds) video streaming and sharing app, with over 100 million users, up until August 2018. The app allowed users a plethora of music and dialogue options, with which they could lip sync and make funny or entertaining videos. See the latest TikTok Stats here The app was widely popular, with some content creators rising to the hall of fame based on their engaging content on Musical.ly. The users shared Musical.ly videos on social media platforms like Instagram, further driving the app’s popularity. However, in August 2018, the app was taken over by a Chinese company ByteDance and its users were moved to TikTok. All of the content and accounts that were present on Musical.ly were automatically transferred to the new TikTok app. 2020 324M2.67B697M118M852M340M313M2.14B1.10B493M 0m 600m 1.2B 1.8B 2.4B 3B What is the TikTok app? What is TikTok? How it Differs From Musical.ly How it Rose to Popularity How Can Brands Leverage TikTok? The Future of TikTok Frequently Asked Questions What is TikTok? TikTok is a short-form, video-sharing app that allows users to create and share 15-second videos, on any topic. TikTok maintains a separate app for the Chinese market, known as Duyin, which has over 300 million active monthly users. The new app’s logo is a combination of the Musical.ly and Duyin logos. How it Differs From Musical.ly The TikTok app is based on the same short-form video concept but is much broader in scope and unlike Musical.ly does not only focus on lip-syncing to music. The TikTok app offers users a wide selection of sounds and song snippets, along with the option to add special effects and filters. There is also an option to directly add videos created on your phone. In September, TikTok added the reactions feature, which allows users to record their reactions to videos and share. TikTok has also added a digital well-being feature that alerts users when they spend over two hours on the app. The new app is being promoted as a video-sharing social network. TikTok's users can create a variety of videos ranging from challenges, dance videos, magic tricks, and funny videos. The key differentiating factor between Musical.ly and TikTok is that the latter has a much broader scope for video creation. Related Content: What Are TikTok LIVE Gifts and How Do They Work? Instagram Reels vs. TikTok: Which Is the Better Platform for Brand... TikTok vs. YouTube: Which Platform Should You Choose? How it Rose to Popularity Since its launch, the TikTok app’s popularity has been growing tremendously. In October 2018, it was the most-downloaded photo and video app in the Apple Store, globally. The app reportedly has amassed over 500 million monthly active users, the US being the most popular country, where it has been downloaded over 80 million times. Some of the key reasons behind the TikTok app’s surge in popularity are: Celebrity Endorsements The app is liked and used by several celebrities, such as Jimmy Fallon, who helped drive the app’s popularity. The app has paid partnerships with several celebrities, in various regions, who promote the app to local audiences. Jimmy Fallon’s interest in the app started naturally but was later capitalized on by the app, through a paid partnership. In November 2018, Jimmy Fallon started a “challenges” section on his show and used TikTok as a platform for the challenge. He urged his viewers to take on the #TumbleweedChallenge and post videos on TikTok of themselves rolling like a tumbleweed. The TV host himself took the challenge, to kickstart this trend. @fallontonightJimmy takes the ##TumbleweedChallenge! Show us your best tumbleweed!♬ #TumbleweedChallenge - FallonTonight The challenge went viral and gathered over 8,000 entries and 10.4 million engagements, within a week. The TikTok app also has celebrity partnerships in other regions. When it launched in Japan, the app roped in celebrities like Kinoshita Yukina, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, and Watanabe Naomi. In Thailand, TikTok collaborated with social media celebrity Kaykai Salaider, and in India with Aashika Bhatia. Celebrity partnerships have been a key tactic in TikTok’s geographical expansion strategy. The app uses celebrities and influencers to drive buzz around the platform and generate viral content. These celebrities not only post content on TikTok, but also promote TikTok on other social media channels. For example, in the post below, Indian celebrity, Aashika Bhatia, promoted the TikTok app on Instagram. Apart from paid partnerships, the brand also benefits from popular social influencers and celebrities who use the platform. These celebrities help bring in their followers to the TikTok app. Localized Content Another key driving factor in TikTok app’s popularity is the fact that despite being a global app, it has a strong focus on localized content. The app often runs local contests and challenges and captures on local trends through the use of localized hashtags. TikTok runs the “1 million audition” contest across several countries, separately. For each contest, participants are given themes to create videos and then the top video creators are awarded. This contest not only leads to the creation of thousands of local videos, for each country where it is held, but also helps TikTok creators gain recognition and followers. One such contest held in Russia in September 2018 gained 31,000 video entries and millions of views from TikTok users. Thus, it helped promote the app in the country. The app also uses local trending hashtags to suggest topics for content creation to its users. This helps the app capitalize on local trends and generate viral content for the platform. For example, “Seaweed Dance” was a fun video type that went viral in China. Tens of thousands of TikTok users created a video on this theme. TikTok also sends personalized recommendations to each of its users. This ensures that TikTok users are always updated on the latest trending videos and are never out of ideas for video creation. Using these techniques, TikTok has been able to pull off localization on a global scale. Easy Content Creation, Sharing, and Viewing The TikTok app has simplified video creation and sharing and taken it to the next level. All users have to do is record anything and everything from their daily routines and post it instantly. Due to the short format, neither the video-creation nor the watching process takes much time or effort. Additionally, this short-form video content is played as soon as a user opens the app. The videos start playing one-by-one and a viewer gets lost in a sea of fun, entertaining, addictive video content. Due to this addictive nature of the type of content, it is very easy for people to keep watching random videos for hours. How Can Brands Leverage TikTok? TikTok does not have any space for traditional display ads and is not even in competition with other social media platforms, in terms of it being a marketing channel. However, due to its fast growth and rising popularity, many brands are now realizing the potential of TikTok as a marketing channel. Several brands have utilized techniques like TikTok challenges and contests to get users to generate brand-related content. Brands are also leveraging hashtags, in a more or less similar fashion as on other social media platforms, to promote their TikTok marketing campaigns. Take, for example, Guess brand’s #InMyDenim campaign. On September 1, 2018, the Guess brand took over TikTok and invited all US-based TikTok users to their #InMyDenim hashtag challenge. The contest urged users to create video content wearing denim (of course) and using the hashtag. This was the start of TikTok’s brand partnerships in the US. Another way in which brands can use TikTok is to collaborate with TikTok celebrities to create brand-specific promotional content. This will be similar to any other influencer collaboration, just with the 15-second TikTok video format. The Future of TikTok The current popularity of the TikTok app is astonishing, but still does not guarantee that it will ever reach the levels achieved by other social networks like Instagram and YouTube. Vine was an extremely popular video-sharing platform back in the day, but it is completely out of the picture now. And there are many other apps that quickly rose to fame and then disappeared. To maintain its current popularity, TikTok will have to keep innovating and finding new ways to engage their user base. They will also have to make the platform more marketing-friendly for brands in order to establish the app as a social network that is going to stay. With more brands looking to TikTok to further expand their social media marketing reach, TikTok is on the right track. If it is able to capitalize on brand engagements, it is sure to grow further and may even be able to compete with other social media platforms. Conclusion In a nutshell, TikTok is a fun, entertaining, and addictive app which has seen a surge in popularity in the last few months. The TikTok app also has the potential to become the next big marketing and social networking platform. However, how the app creators leverage this potential and maintain the current popularity of the app, has yet to be seen. What type of TikTok content are you addicted to? What is TikTok? - Video Frequently Asked Questions What is TikTok? TikTok is a short-form, video-sharing app that allows users to create and share 15-second videos on any topic. Its creator, Bytedance, runs a different version of the app, Douyin, in its home market, China. Both versions of TikTok offer a wide selection of sounds and song snippets, along with the option to add special effects and filters. You can also add videos created on your phone. The company promotes the app as a video-sharing social network. What is the point of TikTok? Why is TikTok banned? Why is TikTok so popular? ...
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tag TikTok and the Fall of the Social-Media Giants Facebook is trying to copy TikTok, but this strategy may well signal the end of these legacy platforms. By Cal Newport July 28, 2022 Illustration of people trapped in cages the shape of TikTok logos. Illustration by Tim Enthoven Last month, Blake Chandlee, TikTok’s president of global business solutions, was asked if he was concerned about competition from existing social-media networks like Facebook. Chandlee, who spent more than twelve years at Mark Zuckerberg’s company before moving to TikTok, dismissed the idea. “Facebook is a social platform. They’ve built all their algorithms based on the social graph,” he said, referring to the network of links to friends, family, and casual acquaintances that Facebook users painstakingly assemble over time. “We are an entertainment platform. The difference is significant.” Chandlee appeared to be responding to recent moves made by Facebook. Last year, the company integrated a TikTok-style short-video format called Reels directly into its main app. Then, in an internal memo sent this spring, Tom Alison, a senior executive at the social-media giant, announced a plan to modify the platform’s news feed to focus more on these short videos, tweaking the algorithm to display the most engaging content, even if these selections are “unconnected” to accounts that a user has friended or followed. Facebook, it seems, is moving away from its traditional focus on text and images, spread among people who know one another, to instead adopt TikTok’s emphasis on pure distraction. This shift is not surprising given TikTok’s phenomenal popularity, but it’s also shortsighted: platforms like Facebook could be doomed if they fail to maintain the social graphs upon which they built their kingdoms. To understand Facebook’s current danger, it helps to better understand its original success. In the spring of 2004, when my college friends signed up for TheFacebook.com, as it was then called, they did so because other people they knew were signing up as well. (One of the platform’s early killer features was the ability to check the “relationship status” of classmates.) By the end of 2006, the year in which Facebook opened to the general public, the service had already gathered twelve million active users. At that point, network-effect advantages made it hard for a competitor to emerge; two years later, when Facebook hit a hundred million active users, competition became all but impossible. Why would you join a new network dedicated to connection with people you know if everyone you knew was already on Facebook? Sign up for the New Yorker Recommends newsletter. What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. E-mail address Your e-mail address Sign up By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement. The next major evolution of this model of leveraging a social graph to create engagement was sparked by Twitter. Though it was launched in 2006, this short-messaging service didn’t achieve broader notice until 2009. This was the year in which Ashton Kutcher discussed Twitter on “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” It was also the year in which the news leaked that a U.S. State Department official e-mailed the company, urging it to delay planned server maintenance so as not to interfere with planned pro-democracy protests in Iran. For Twitter, however, arguably the most important event of 2009 was not these publicity bonanzas but the introduction of the retweet button. This tweak, originally intended to simplify the common practice of manually cutting and pasting the text of interesting tweets, ended up transforming Twitter. By eliminating the friction required to forward a message to all of your followers, the retweet button created a fierce viral dynamic in which a single tweet could be amplified to a large audience in a short period of time, its readership expanding exponentially through the power-law topology of the Twitter network. This turned out to be a phenomenally effective method for surfacing the most engaging content floating around the platform at any given moment. This potential for sudden mass exposure also began to draw more influential individuals to the platform, further increasing the value of its content. As with Facebook, the larger that Twitter’s social graph grew, the more attractive the network became. Pretenders to the short-message throne, such as Parler or Gab, struggled to get traction, as their networks lacked sufficient size and numbers of influential users to compete in a battle for attention. By 2011, Twitter, following in Facebook’s footsteps, passed the milestone of a hundred million users. Facebook, of course, noticed this new competitor’s fast rise and began to make adjustments. Between 2009 and 2011, Facebook increasingly moved its news feed away from chronological sorting and toward an emphasis on popular posts. Then, in 2012, it added a retweet-style Share button on its mobile app, enabling the Twitter-style exponential spread of third-party content through the network. Both Facebook and Twitter were built on the same general model of leveraging hard-to-replicate, large social graphs to generate a never-ending stream of engaging content, a strategy that proved to be robust in the face of new competition and incredibly lucrative. It’s why, last month, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, had a market cap of five hundred and sixty-two billion dollars, making it the world’s seventh most valuable corporation. It’s also why Twitter, a smaller and more specialized social-media network, was still worth forty-four billion dollars to Elon Musk (before he changed his mind). Pseudo-monopolies of this type, however, cannot last forever. The past decade has been good for these social-media giants, but the sudden ascent of TikTok might turn out to be the disruption that finally ends their reign. When you load TikTok, you’re presented with a short video, often well under a minute in length, filling your smartphone screen. When you’re ready to see something different, you swipe up, and a new video, selected specifically for you by the service’s recommendation algorithm, is pulled in to take over the display. If you observe a TikTok session over the shoulder of a practiced user, you’ll encounter a frenetic sequence of swipes, with most videos watched for only a few moments to assess their appeal, before being pushed away to sample what’s next. VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER Death and the Lady: When the Grim Reaper Knocks The effectiveness of the TikTok experience is found in what it doesn’t require. Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression, to generate its appeal. And, unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn’t require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they’re not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn’t rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm. A 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal, in which reporters created more than a hundred TikTok accounts to tease out the basic dynamics of this suggestion logic, showed that the app can target a user’s interests with uncanny accuracy in as little as forty minutes of observation. This rejection of the social-graph model has allowed TikTok to circumvent the barriers to entry that so effectively protected early social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By separating distraction from social connection, TikTok can directly compete for users without the need to first painstakingly build up an underlying network, link by link. By all accounts, this attention blitzkrieg is working incredibly well. TikTok is estimated to have a billion active monthly users, a number it achieved in a breathtakingly short time, and according to some reports it boasts an average session length of 10.85 minutes, which, if true, would be far longer than that of any other major social-media app. Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company recently lost more than two hundred and thirty billion dollars in market capitalization in a single day after the company announced that user growth had stalled. Analysts identified TikTok as an important factor in this slowdown. These developments put traditional social-media companies like Facebook in a perilous bind. It’s obvious that, if they don’t make moves to arrest the flow of users from their platforms to TikTok, their investors will revolt and valuations will continue to fall. This explains Facebook’s recent transition toward short videos and algorithmic recommendations of content that doesn’t come from friend groups. Perhaps less obvious, however, is the longer-term danger in shifting away from the connection-centric model that has served the company so well. It’s unlikely, at this point, that a new competitor will ever again be able to build a social graph of a size or a level of influence comparable to those of legacy platforms like Facebook and Twitter—it’s simply too hard to start from scratch when these mature services already exist. It follows that, so long as these legacy platforms rely on their underlying networks as their primary source of value, they will retain a monopolistic protection of sorts within the broader attention economy. If they instead move away from their social-graph foundations to concentrate on optimizing in-the-moment engagement, they’ll enter a competitive landscape that pits them directly against the many other existing sources of mobile distraction—not just TikTok but also more bespoke and specialized social networks, such as the Gen-Z sensation BeReal, to say nothing of popular video streamers, podcasts, video games, self-improvement apps, and, for the somewhat older demographic to which I belong, Wordle. This all points to a possible future in which social-media giants like Facebook may soon be past their long stretch of dominance. They’ll continue to chase new engagement models, leaving behind the protection of their social graphs, and in doing so eventually succumb to the new competitive pressures this introduces. TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction. It’s here that I find optimism. The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections. This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes. In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet. ♦ ...
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tag On the Psychology of TikTok Use: A First Glimpse From Empirical Findings Christian Montag1,2*, Haibo Yang3 and Jon D. Elhai4,5 1Department of Molecular Psychology, Institute of Psychology and Education, Ulm University, Ulm, Germany 2The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, MOE Key Lab for Neuroinformation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 3Faculty of Psychology, Tianjin Normal University, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, Tianjin, China 4Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, United States 5Department of Psychiatry, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, United States TikTok (in Chinese: DouYin; formerly known as musical.ly) currently represents one of the most successful Chinese social media applications in the world. Since its founding in September 2016, TikTok has seen widespread distribution, in particular, attracting young users to engage in viewing, creating, and commenting on “LipSync-Videos” on the app. Despite its success in terms of user numbers, psychological studies aiming at an understanding of TikTok use are scarce. This narrative review provides a comprehensive overview on the small empirical literature available thus far. In particular, insights from uses and gratification theory in the realm of TikTok are highlighted, and we also discuss aspects of the TikTok platform design. Given the many unexplored research questions related to TikTok use, it is high time to strengthen research efforts to better understand TikTok use and whether certain aspects of its use result in detrimental behavioral effects. In light of user characteristics of the TikTok platform, this research is highly relevant because TikTok users are often adolescents and therefore from a group of potentially vulnerable individuals. Background Musical.ly was founded in September 2016 by Zhang Yiming. Beijing Bytedance Technology acquired the application musical.ly in November 2017 and renamed the app to TikTok. In a short time period, this application became the most successful app from Chinese origin in terms of global distribution (1). As of November 2020, 800 million monthly users have been reported1, and 738 million first-time installs in 2019 have been estimated2. TikTok use is allowed for those 13 years or older, but direct messaging between users is allowed only for those 16 or older (in order to protect young users from grooming)3. In China, the main users of TikTok are under 35 years old (81.68% (2)). Meanwhile, to protect children and adolescents from unsuitable content (such as smoking, drinking, or rude language), TikTok's engineers also developed a version of the app, which filters inappropriate content for young users (2). Of note, at the moment of writing, the app operates as TikTok on the global market and as DouYin on the Chinese market (3). Similarities and differences of the twin apps are further described with a content analysis by Sun et al. (4). The TikTok application available for Android and Apple smartphones enables creation of short videos where users can perform playback-videos to diverse pop-songs, to name one very prominent feature of the platform. These so-called “LipSync-Videos” can be shared with other users, downloaded for non-commercial purposes, commented upon and of course attached with a “Like.” Not only are playback-videos uploaded on TikTok but also users view a large amount of video content. Users can also call out for “challenges,” where they define which performance should be created by many users. As a consequence, TikTok users imitate the content or interact with the original video. As the large user numbers in a very short time-window demonstrate, TikTok not only represents a global phenomenon but also has been criticized with respect to data protection issues/privacy (5, 6), spreading hate (7) and might serve as a platform engendering cyberbullying (8, 9). Given the many young users of this platform (e.g., 81.68% of China users of Tiktok are under 35 years old—see above, and 32.5% of the US users are 19 years old and younger)4, it is of particular relevance to better understand the motivation to use TikTok, alongside related topics. Such an understanding might also be relevant because recent research suggests that TikTok can be a potent channel to inform young persons on health-relevant information (10–12), on official information release from the government (13), political discussions (14), tourism content (15), live online sales (16), and even educational content (17). There even have been video-posts analyzed in a scientific paper related to radiology (18). Clearly, young TikTok users are also confronted with harmful health content, including smoking of e-cigarettes (19). Moreover, the health information learned from TikTok videos often does not meet necessary standards—as is discussed in a paper on acne (20). Finally, there arises the problem that while creating content, children's/adolescent's private home bedrooms from which they create TikTok videos become visible to the world, posing privacy intrusions (21). The many obviously negative aspects of TikTok use are in itself important further research leads. From a psychological perspective, we take a different path with the present review and try to better understand why people use TikTok, who uses the platform, and also how people use TikTok. Why do People Use TikTok? This question can be answered from different perspectives. One perspective providing an initial answer and—likely being true for most social media services—has been put forward by Montag and Hegelich (22). Social media companies have created services being highly immersive, aiming to capture the attention of users as long as possible (23). As a result of a prolonged user stay, social media companies obtain deep insights into psychological features of their users (24), which can be used for microtargeting purposes (25). Such immersive platform design also likely drives users with certain characteristics into problematic social media use (26) or problematic TikTok use (addictive-like behavior), but this aspect relating to TikTok use is understudied. Nevertheless, reinforcement of TikTok usage is also very likely reached by design-elements such as “Likes” (27), personalized and endless content available (23). TikTok's “For You”-Page (the landing page) learns quickly via artificial intelligence what users like, which likely results in longer TikTok use than a user intended, which may cause smartphone TikTok-related addictive behavior (2). This said, these ideas put forward still need to be confirmed by empirical studies dealing exclusively with TikTok. In this realm, an interesting research piece recently investigated less studied variables such as first-person camera views, but also humor on key variables such as immersion and entertainment on the TikTok platform (28), again all of relevance to prolong user stay. The other perspective one could choose to address why people use TikTok stems from uses and gratification theory (29, 30). The simple idea of this highly influential theory is that use of certain media can result in gratification of a person's needs (30), and only if relevant needs of a person are gratified by particular media, users will continue media use—here digital platform or social media use. A recent paper by Bucknell Bossen and Kottasz (31) provided insight that, in particular, gratification of entertainment/affective needs was the most relevant driver to understand a range of behaviors on TikTok, including passive consumption of content, but also creating content and interacting with others. In particular, the authors summarized that TikTok participation was motivated by needs to expand one's social network, seek fame, and express oneself creatively. Recent work by Omar and Dequan (32) also applied uses and gratification theory to better understand TikTok use. In their work, especially the need for escapism predicted TikTok content consumption, whereas self-expression was linked to both participating and producing behavior. A study by Shao and Lee (33) not only applied uses and gratification theory to understand TikTok use but also shed light on TikTok use satisfaction and the intention to further use TikTok. In line with findings from the already mentioned works, entertainment/information alongside communication and self-expression were discussed as relevant use motives (needs to be satisfied by TikTok use). Satisfaction with TikTok was investigated as a mediator between different motives to use TikTok and to continue TikTok use. We also mention recent work being unable to link TikTok use to well-being, whether in a positive or negative way (34). Finally, Wang et al. (35) underlined the overall relevance of uses and gratification theory to understand TikTok use and presented need variables in cognitive and affective domains as relevant to study, but also personal/social integration and relief of pressure. In this context, we also mention the view of Shao (2) who put forward that, in particular, young people use TikTok for positioning oneself in their peer group and to understand where he/she stands in the peer group. Thus, TikTok is also relevant for identity formation of young persons and obtaining feedback to oneself. Further theories need to be mentioned, which can explain why people are using the TikTok platform: Social Impact Theory and Self-Determination Theory. To our knowledge, these theories have not been sufficiently addressed empirically so far with respect to TikTok use, but are well known to be of relevance to understand social media use in general and are therefore mentioned. Clearly, an important driver of social media use can be power, hence, reaching out to many and influencing other persons (36). Here, the classic Social Impact Theory (SIT) by Latané (37) tries to understand how to best measure the impact of people on a single individual/individuals. This theory—originating in the pre-social-media-age—gained a lot of visibility with the rise of social media services because, in particular, in the age of filter bubbles, fake news, and misinformation campaigns (38, 39), it is interesting to understand how individual users on social media are socially influenced by others, for instance, in the area of their (political) attitudes. The SIT postulates three highly relevant factors called strength, immediacy, and number (of sources) to predict such a social impact. Ultimately, applying this theory to better understand TikTok use also needs to take into account that users differ in terms of their active and passive use. The Self-Determination Theory (SDT) has been proposed by Ryan and Deci (40) and belongs to the most influential motivation theories of human behavior. Hence, it clearly can also be used to explain why people are motivated to use a social media service (41, 42). According to SDT, motivated behavior (here using TikTok) should be high, when such a platform enables users to feel competence, autonomy, and being connected with others. Design of the platform can help to trigger related psychological states (e.g., push notifications can trigger fear of missing out, hence, not being connected to significant others) (43); but clearly also, individual differences play a relevant role, and this should be discussed as the next important area in this work. As with the SIT, applying SDT to better understand TikTok use will also need to take into account different kinds of TikTok use. A sense of self-determination might rise to different levels, when users are actively or passively using TikTok—and this also represents an interesting research question. Who Uses TikTok and Who Does Not? The aforementioned statistics show that TikTok users are often young. Bucknell Bossen and Kottasz (31) illustrated that, in particular, young users are also those who seem to be particularly active on the platform, and thus share much information. Given that, in particular, young users often do not foresee consequences of self-disclosure, it is of high importance to better protect this vulnerable group from detrimental aspects of social media use. Beyond age, statistics suggest that more females than males use the platform5, something also observed with other platforms (44–46). First, insights from personality psychology provided further information on associations between characteristics of TikTok users and how they use it (see also the next How Do People Use TikTok? section): The widely applied Big Five Personality traits called openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (acronym OCEAN) were all robustly linked to producing, participating, and consuming behavior on TikTok, with the exception of agreeableness only being linked to consuming behavior (32). Using a hierarchical regression model inserting both personality variables and motives from uses and gratification theory, it became apparent that the latter variables seemed to outweigh the personality variables in their importance to predict TikTok usage. Lu et al. (47) used data from China to investigate individual differences in DouYin (again the Chinese version of TikTok) use. Among others, they observed that people refraining from using DouYin did so out of fear of getting “addicted” to the application [see also (48)]. This needs to be further systematically explored with the Big Five model of personality (or HEXACO, as the personality models dominating modern personality psychology at the moment). Without doubt, it will be also highly important to better understand how the variables of socio-demographics and personality interact on TikTok use, also in the realm of active/passive use of the platform. Active use would describe a high engagement toward the platform including commenting and uploading videos. Passive usage would reflect in browsing and simply consuming videos. The need to distinguish between active and passive use of social media has been also recently empirically supported by Peterka-Bonetta et al. (49). How do People Use TikTok? In the Why Do People Use TikTok? section, we already mentioned that users can passively view content, but also create content or interact with others. Studies comprehensively showing how many and which types of people use TikTok with respect to these behavioral categories are lacking (but TikTok likely has at least some of these insights). A recent review by Kross et al. (50) on “social media (use) and well-being” summarized that several psychological processes such as upward social comparison (perhaps also happening in so-called “challenges” on TikTok) or fear of missing out (43) are related to negative affect and might have detrimental effects on the usage experience and/or TikTok users' lives in general. Overall, the psychological impact of the TikTok platform might also be very likely, in particular, when adolescents often imitate their idols in “LipSync-Videos” (51). The kind of influence of such behavior on the development of one's own identity and self-esteem (self-confidence) (52) will be a matter of important psychological discussion, but it is too early to speculate further on potential psychological effects here, both in the positive or negative direction (53). Moreover, whether such effects will be of positive or negative nature, we mention the importance to not overpathologize everyday life behavior (54). In sum, much of what we know with respect to platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, or even WeChat (56) needs to still be investigated in the context of TikTok, to understand if psychological observations made for other social media channels can be transferred “one-on-one” to TikTok. For instance, illustrating differences between social media platforms, Bhandari and Bimo (57) suggested in their analysis of TikTok that in contrast to other platforms, “the crux of interaction is not between users and their social network, but between a user and what we call an ‘algorithmized’ version of self.” Opening TikTok immediately results in being captured by a personalized stream of videos. Therefore, we believe it to be unlikely that all insights from social media research can be easily transferred to TikTok because it is well-known that each social media platform has a unique design also attracting different user groups (45), and they elicit different immersive or “addictive” potential (58). Please note that we use the term “addictive” only in quotation marks, given the ongoing debate on the actual nature of excessive social media use (59, 60). This said, we explicitly mention that the study of problematic social media use represents a very important topic (61), although at the moment, this condition—of relevance for the mental health sciences—is not officially recognized by the World Health Organization. Despite the ongoing controversy, nevertheless, it has been recently pointed out that social media companies are responsible for the well-being of users, too (55). Conclusions and Outlook Although user numbers are high and TikTok represents a highly successful social media platform around the globe, we know surprisingly less about psychological mechanisms related to TikTok use. Most research has been carried out so far yielding insights into user motives applying uses and gratification theory. Although this theory is of high importance to understand TikTok use, it is still rather broad and general. In particular, when studying a platform such as TikTok—receiving attention at the moment from a lot of young users—more specific needs or facets of the broad dimensions of uses and gratification theory (such as social usage) being more strongly related to the needs of adolescents might need more focus. One such focus could be a stronger emphasis on the study of self-esteem (62) in the context of TikTok use. Work beyond this area, e.g., investigating potential detrimental aspects, are scarce, but will be important. In particular, we deem this to be true, as TikTok attracts very young users, being more vulnerable to detrimental aspects of social media use (63). We believe that it is also high time for researchers to put research energy in the study of TikTok and to do so in a comprehensive manner. Among others, it needs also to be studied how active and passive use impact on the well-being of the users. This means that the here-discussed how-, why-, and who-questions need to be studied together in one framework, and this needs to be done against the data business model and its immersive platform design. The key ideas of this review to understand TikTok use and related aspects such as well-being of the users are presented in Figure 1. Figure 1 www.frontiersin.org FIGURE 1. In order to understand the relationship between a social media service such as TikTok and human psychological processes and behavior, one needs to answer the who-, why-, and how-questions, also against the background of the social media platform design. Please note that the platform design itself is driven by the data business model. Social media usage and its association with psychological/behavioral variables such as well-being, online-time, and so on can be best understood by investigating these variables in one model, at best also investigating potential interactions of variables. These ideas have also been described in parts in Montag and Hegelich (22), Kross et al. (50), and Montag et al. (55). The figure does not exclusively mention TikTok because we are convinced that the presented details are true for all research agendas aiming at a better understanding of the relationship between social media use and well-being. Author Contributions CM wrote the first draft of this review article. HY screened the Chinese literature and added relevant work from a Chinese perspective to the review. Finally, JDE critically worked over the complete draft. All authors agreed upon the final version of the article. Conflict of Interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. 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tag How TikTok’s algorithm made it a success: ‘It pushes the boundaries’ The company’s secret sauce is what populates its For You Page, which predicts the videos that will pique a viewer’s interest Read the new Guardian series exploring the increasing power and reach of TikTok by Alex Hern Mon 24 Oct 2022 06.00 BST It is, quite literally, the trillion dollar question: how did TikTok go from a niche social network for lip-syncing teens to the most popular app in the western world, threatening to knock Facebook off its perch entirely, in just a few short years? There are no end of possible answers, and TikTok owes its phenomenal success to a host of canny choices: easy-to-use video creation tools blurred the line between creator and consumer far more than YouTube had ever managed; a vast library of licensed music allowed teens to soundtrack their clips without fear of copyright strikes; a billion-dollar advertising campaign across Facebook and Instagram bought new users as quickly as Zuckerberg’s company would send them over. But the most powerful tool TikTok has to grab users and keep them hooked is the company’s feted “For You Page”, the FYP, and the algorithm that populates it. A person’s silhouette can be seen on a wall with the TikTok music note logo. TikTok’s For You Page has the ability to grab users and keep them hooked. Photograph: Martin Meissner/AP The FYP is the default screen new users see when opening the app. Even if you don’t follow a single other account, you’ll find it immediately populated with a never-ending stream of short clips culled from what’s popular across the service. That decision already gave the company a leg up compared to the competition: a Facebook or Twitter account with no friends or followers is a lonely, barren place, but TikTok is engaging from day one. It’s what happens next that is the company’s secret sauce, though. As you scroll through the FYP, the makeup of videos you’re presented with slowly begins to change, until, the app’s regular users say, it becomes almost uncannily good at predicting what videos from around the site are going to pique your interest. The company is disarmingly open about how that algorithm works – at least, on the surface. “Recommendations are based on a number of factors,” it said in 2020, “including things like user interactions such as the videos you like or share, accounts you follow, comments you post, and content you create; video information, which might include details like captions, sounds, and hashtags; [and] device and account settings like your language preference, country setting, and device type.” But how those various inputs are weighted, and what precise factors lead any particular video to end up on your feed, is opaque, says Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom. “One person at TikTok in charge of trying to track what goes viral and why told me in my book that ‘There’s no recipe for it, there’s no magic formula.’ The employee even admitted that ‘It’s a question I don’t think even the algo team have the answer to. It’s just so sophisticated.’” One crucial innovation is that, unlike older recommendation algorithms, TikTok doesn’t just wait for the user to indicate that they like a video with a thumbs up, or satisfy itself by judging what a user chooses to view. Instead, it appears to actively test its own predictions, experimenting by showing videos that it thinks might be enjoyable and gauging the response. “It pushes the boundaries of your interests and monitors how you engage with those new videos it seeds in your For You Page,” Stokel-Walker says. “If it thinks you like videos about Formula One, it might show you some videos about supercars.” A girl sets up her smartphone on a ring light in front of an archway that looks out onto a bright blue ocean scene. TikTok creators, such as Gabby Murray, in Palm Beach, Florida, had amassed 8.5 million followers in 2021. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images That experimentation doesn’t just allow the service to rapidly discern the contours of an individual viewer’s interests, it’s also an important part of what the site offers creators, says Sascha Morgan-Evans, head of the TikTok studio at creative agency OK COOL. “Every video posted on TikTok gets served to at least one person on the For You Page. We’ve figured out, based on how views accumulate, that TikTok serves each individual video to batches of people. The number of users in these batches increases with each successful round, one where a majority of users within a batch had a high number of positive interactions with the video.” That means that every user has the chance of global fame. Even if you have no followers at all, your video will eventually make it on to someone’s For You Page, and if they are deemed to have engaged positively, you can reach thousands or millions of viewers extremely quickly. And the speed of the videos helps TikTok hone its data rapidly: “Think about how many videos you watch in an hour on YouTube,” Stokel-Walker says, “and the data that generates about you – versus how many you can watch on TikTok.” The FYP isn’t magic, though, and the ways it fails can be just as instructive as the ways it succeeds. New users of the app will notice that it is obsessive about harvesting personal data, begging for access to the contacts list and tracking every inbound and outbound shared video. Deny it those datapoints, and it is forced to present the most generic possible version of the feed, personalised to what little it can determine from broad geolocation and device details. But when it works, the algorithm is so good at what it sets out to do that TikTok appears almost overwhelmed by its power, Stokel-Walker says. “It’s even slipped in messages to users it thinks are too addicted, saying they should put the phone down.” One such message, shown from the company’s TikTokTips account to users scrolling through their feed for hours straight late at night, features TikTok star Gabe Erwin imploring the viewer to “go get some extra sleep, turn your phone off, do yourself that favour and have a great night”. The company has also added new “screen time” features, particularly for younger users, turning off notifications past bedtime and allowing users to set a maximum time on the app each day, in an effort to limit the most compulsive use of its app. A woman holds a smartphone with the TikTok logo showing on a black background. TikTok has added features that allow users to limit compulsive use of its app. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images As TikTok moves into its second year of online dominance – the app overtook YouTube for average time per user in September 2021 and has stayed at the top ever since – the big question is whether its algorithmic success can remain a unique selling point. Facebook certainly hopes not: the social network, along with corporate sibling Instagram, recently announced an overhaul of its apps to focus on an aggressive new algorithmic curation engine. Just like TikTok, Facebook and Instagram will now show you vast quantities of content from users you don’t follow, with posts from friends buried in between, or hidden on a separate “following” feed behind a tab. The change was poorly received, leading to an apology video from Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who said the company would be dialing back some of the alterations – but that ultimately, this was the future. “We’re going to try and get better at recommendations,” he said, “because we think it’s one of the best ways to help creators reach a new audience and grow their following.” If there is a threat to TikTok’s algorithmic crown, it might be from the company itself. The app dominates user attention, but has historically been lightly monetised. As a privately held company, TikTok doesn’t publish revenue figures but in 2021, research firm eMarketer estimates it took in $4bn a year – less than 5% of Facebook’s revenue. In 2022, the company has tried to grow that. It’s taken the traditional approach, with more adverts injected into the feed, but also tried more novel opportunities, including a push for QVC-style live shopping experiences, lifted from Chinese sister app Douyin. The launch went poorly. Hosts and brands had to be subsidised by TikTok, which pushed deep discounts in sales but failed to garner a regular returning audience. Worse, sales with too-good-to-be-true prices were undercut by other items whose prices really were too good to be true: the platform struggled with a counterfeiting problem, leaving users unclear if a Dyson hairdryer worth £450 is selling for £14 because of a subsidy or a scam. But if TikTok can work out how to balance the commercially-necessary tweaks to its algorithm with the pure compulsion of the FYP at its best (or worst), then it will have created an artefact of tech history that will go down alongside the News Feed, Infinite Scroll and (Snapchat) Story as emblematic of the social media era. … as you’re joining us today from India, we have a small favour to ask. Tens of millions have placed their trust in the Guardian’s fearless journalism since we started publishing 200 years ago, turning to us in moments of crisis, uncertainty, solidarity and hope. More than 1.5 million supporters, from 180 countries, now power us financially – keeping us open to all, and fiercely independent. Unlike many others, the Guardian has no shareholders and no billionaire owner. Just the determination and passion to deliver high-impact global reporting, always free from commercial or political influence. Reporting like this is vital for democracy, for fairness and to demand better from the powerful. And we provide all this for free, for everyone to read. We do this because we believe in information equality. Greater numbers of people can keep track of the events shaping our world, understand their impact on people and communities, and become inspired to take meaningful action. Millions can benefit from open access to quality, truthful news, regardless of their ability to pay for it. Whether you give a little or a lot, your funding will power our reporting for the years to come. Support the Guardian from as little as $1 – it only takes a minute. If you can, please consider supporting us with a regular amount each month. Thank you. .....
tag TikTok: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It's Popular With over 2.5 billion installs, TikTok is a very valuable app By DEBORAH D'SOUZA Updated July 05, 2022 Reviewed by ERIKA RASURE Fact checked by VIKKI VELASQUEZ What Is TikTok? TikTok is a popular social media app that allows users to create, watch, and share 15-second videos shot on mobile devices or webcams. With its personalized feeds of quirky short videos set to music and sound effects, the app is notable for its addictive quality and high levels of engagement. Amateur and professional creators alike can add effects like filters, background music, and stickers to their videos, and can collaborate on content and create split-screen duet videos even if they're in different locations. KEY TAKEAWAYS TikTok allows users to watch, create, and share short videos online....
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tag TikTok From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to navigationJump to search This article is about the social media service. For the film, see TikTok (film). For the song by American singer Kesha, see Tik Tok (song). For other uses, see Tick tock (disambiguation). TikTok Pte. Ltd. TikTok logo.svg Douyin logo.svg TikTok.com Screenshot.png Screenshot of TikTok.com website Developer(s) ByteDance Initial release September 2016; 6 years ago Stable release 26.4.1 / 8 October 2022 Operating system iOSiPadOSAndroid Predecessor musical.ly Available in 40 languages[1] List of languages Type Video sharing License Proprietary software with Terms of Use Website tiktok.com douyin.com Douyin Chinese 抖音 Literal meaning "Vibrating sound" Transcriptions TikTok, known in China as Douyin (Chinese: 抖音; pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a short-form video hosting service owned by Chinese company ByteDance.[2] It hosts a variety of short-form user videos, from genres like pranks, stunts, tricks, jokes, dance, and entertainment[3][4] with durations from 15 seconds to ten minutes.[5][6][7][8] TikTok is an international version of Douyin, which was originally released in the Chinese market in September 2016.[9] TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it became available worldwide only after merging with another Chinese social media service, Musical.ly, on 2 August 2018. TikTok and Douyin have almost the same user interface but no access to each other's content. Their servers are each based in the market where the respective app is available.[10] The two products are similar, but their features are not identical. Douyin includes an in-video search feature that can search by people's faces for more videos of them and other features such as buying, booking hotels and making geo-tagged reviews.[11] Since their launch in 2016, TikTok and Douyin rapidly gained popularity in virtually all parts of the world.[12][13] TikTok surpassed 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide in October 2020.[14][15][16] Morning Consult ranked TikTok as the third fastest growing brand of 2020, after only Zoom and Peacock.[17] Cloudflare ranked TikTok as the most popular website of 2021, surpassing Google.[18] TikTok has been subject to criticism over psychological effects such as addiction, as well as controversies over inappropriate content, misinformation, censorship and moderation, and user privacy. Note ; all those port already in other website, we just use for knowledge.