- Background of TikTok
TikTok is the overseas version of Douyin, is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service that is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance first launched Douyin for the Chinese market in September 2016. Soon after the App was launched in markets outside China in 2017, which is TikTok. Now, the App is super popular in the United States, the United Kingdom,Asia and other area of the world (Bellan, 2020). According to statistics, TikTok is the second one in the ranking of Apps downloads worldwide in 2019 and revenue growing $177, this is equal to more than five times its 2018 revenue (Jones, 2020). The market value of TikTok is now as high as $ 75 billion at present.
- How does TikTok make money?
Similar to Instagram and YouTube, TikTok is supplying an advertisement to push brands. Many brands use TikTok to promote their products or services through feed video ads. These videos are usually displayed when users open the app and switch videos. Based on the huge user volume of TikTok, it has attracted many brands to advertise on this platform. At the same time, increasing user growth makes the brand side more confident in TikTok. This becomes a virtuous circle especially when big brands are promoting on TikTok.
Advertisers using YouTube typically post videos between 2 to 5 minutes or 8 to 15 minutes. This is in stark contrast to TikTok’s short video of 15 to 60 seconds. Get the attention of consumers in the first few seconds. And on the TikTok platform, users can also participate in activities released by the brand side, which greatly improves the contact between users and the brand side
For example, MAC Cosmetics and Pulse Advertising partnered with 18 diversity TikTok influencers during New York Fashion Week in September 2019 to launch a hashtag challenge campaign called #YouOwnIt. It could be the most successful ad campaign on Tiktok, a total of 635,000 videos were created during the six-day event, with video views totaling approximately 2.3 billion, achieved the highest number of video views ever with a TikTok campaign for MAC Cosmetics (Pulse Advertising | Blog, 2020). The objective of this campaign was to encourage more diversity and find the beauty of ourselves. In my opinion, a successful platform must not only have a huge number of users and respectable income, but more importantly, it can spread positive energy to users even society.
- How does TikTok attracts large numbers of users
The reason TikTok stands out from the competition is that it is more like an entertainment platform than a lifestyle platform. You can upload any kind of video on this platform, including news, education, imitating a movie or TV drama clips, pets, travel, cooking etc. And the application is very simple and clear to use that, most people can become a video creator in TikTok, and encourages users to share their creative expression and passion by their videos. Videos of TikTok are normally based on music, so language usually does not pose a major impediment, and few videos are news-related, so they are not easily outdated. For example, “Challenges” are one of the key engagement drivers on Tiktok, a creative conceptinterpreted by lots of TikTok users. Usually, the audio track stays the same, whether it’s a song snippet or a renowned line from TV or movie. Different challenge has its particular hashtag, under which all such videos can be discovered (Iqbal, 2020).
In addition, TikTok’s cutting-edge AI technology makes users more captivated to the App. TikTok’s algorithm evaluate personal preferences is really fast. The longer you use it, the more accurate he will be in your interpretation. They pass the user’s “like” and comments, and the length and number of times they watched each video.
Moreover, TikTok provides people with unlimited opportunities and possibilities. Many people use TikTok to start making videos, writing copy, and editing clips by themselves, even from an obscure office worker to a blogger with millions of followers. Many musicians have been obscured because they did not have a good platform to promote their songs before, now they just uploaded their songs in TikTok’s music library or sing in a video, it will be easy for everyone to know.
Simple operation, allowing users to have a strong sense of participation, discovering their unlimited possibilities, providing a larger platform and more opportunities, and use AI to analysis user habits to curate recommended content, all have established the success of TikTok.
- Conclusion
TikTok follows the development of the times, fully utilizes the digital business of Industry 4.0, maximizes its own benefits, and sustainable. Besides, continue to innovate and improve.
- Reference
Bellan, R. (2020). TikTok Is The Most Downloaded App Worldwide, And India Is Leading The Charge. [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccabellan/2020/02/14/tiktok-is-the-most-downloaded-app-worldwide-and-india-is-leading-the-charge/#9f1dc7872666
Iqbal, M. (2020). TikTok Revenue and Usage Statistics (2020). [online] Business of Apps. Available at: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
Jones, K. (2020). Ranked: The World’s Most Downloaded Apps. [online] Visual Capitalist. Available at: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-most-downloaded-apps/
Pulse Advertising | Blog. (2020). #YouOwnIt: Our Campaign With MAC Cosmetics Achieves A Record 2 Billion Views! | PULSE ADVERTISING. [online] Available at: https://www.pulse-advertising.com/blog/2019/09/26/youownit-our-campaign-with-mac-cosmetics-achieves-a-record-1-5-billion-views/
Live well, love lots, and laugh often 
Hi Wang,
Tiktok is indeed a perfect example of the success of digital media platforms. On the one hand, people play the role of self-media through Tiktok, they share interesting things in life and their own insights, gain a lot of fans and traffic, and get more business cooperation opportunities. On the other hand, with the emergence of more and more self-media people, the number of users of Tiktok is also increasing, so that more opportunities for advertising cooperation with other companies are based on the huge number of users and traffic on its own platform. This is an effective win-win model, which had great learning value.
However, there is also a problem is that when everyone can become a part of the participants to sell their own products, it is difficult to ensure the quality of the product and after-sales service. So how to deal with this part of the problem?
Very valuable blog post, looking forward to your reply.
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I like your blog very much because I also like watching TikTok. TikTok can provide entertaining content for complex and melancholic young people. The successful operation of any product on the Internet is inseparable from technology and background. As your blog shows, a lot of AI Lab face recognition technology and AR, 3D and other technologies are used in TikTok. Such as: awkward dance, 3D dyeing, face changing and other procedures.
TikTok is an operation-winning platform. Whether it is from a unique community tone, a personalized distribution mechanism, or a fast iterative functional version, we can feel its good product operation capabilities.
Although TikTok has achieved good development results in all aspects, there are still some shortcomings in the product. The live broadcast function does not have a specific crowd positioning, so this function does not exert sufficient drainage effects. The low quality of short video content is another problem that it faces. This and its market sinking strategy have led to a lower threshold for users to release videos and users. Directing errors are directly linked. For it to continue to expand the market while ensuring the steady improvement of content quality has become a problem it faces.
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Hi Wang,
I really like the app Tik Tok. When I am bored, I like to watch videos by it. Most of the videos in Tiktok are very interesting, so that I often watch Tiktok until the late night, which affects my sleep. What do you think about the problem of young people indulging in social apps like Tiktok?
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