To best understand TikTok you have to understand and look at it in the context of its predecessors – Musically & Vine.
I think Vine can be credited for essentially starting and popularizing the trend of short videos as independent pieces of content. Of course, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc all existed before Vine, but Vine was really the tipping point for short videos (< 6s) to take off as a large and serious format in which people made content. You can view Musically as almost an extension of Vine, in that it allowed most of the same behavior (short videos) but it added this new layer of lip-syncing which had one massive change – it made the barrier to entry of creating content much much lower.
For a Vine to be “good” you both needed to have a good idea and good execution. The social cost of a bad Vine was fairly high (the same as say a bad tweet). This naturally meant that like most products Vine had a small number of creators and the majority of the users were just consumers.
Musically changed this because while having a good idea and execution was still the best recipe for having a high quality Musically, the lip-syncing feature made it easy to make videos that were explicitly supported by the mechanics of the app. So while you still had high quality Musically’s, many were just people lip-syncing songs, and there was the little social cost to them since the app mechanics supported and encouraged this. This, I think is super important. It meant that the pool of creators in Musically was massive.
TikTok hits the scene
TikTok is this same principle but taken to the next level. So there can still exist high-quality TikToks with unique ideas and good execution, but there also exists medium to bad quality TikToks of people lip-syncing songs and memes. And on top of that TikTok has unique features that add camera filters and easy editing tricks that even further reduces the barrier to content creation. I think this is at the heart of TikTok’s success and their growth strategy – their ability to continuously grow the base of people that can create content.
Another way to think about this is the sustainability of Vine – there are many reasons Vine couldn’t live (not monetizing correctly is one of them of course). But another critical part is that Vine’s small group of creators held all the power and leverage on the platform – and because of the restrictive nature of their format (just videos, super short) creators often got their start on Vine and moved on to other platforms like Instagram and particularly YouTube. In short – i think it’s incredibly difficult to succeed if your platform has a restrictive format for creating content and relies on a small set of users as the sole source of content.
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TikTok sidesteps this problem by dramatically increasing the pool of people that can make content, mainly by lowering the social cost of bad content (and also by allowing for other formats and types of content to exist). So the reason Tik ok stays successful is not because their content is super high quality and curated (which I think it can be over time through better ranking) – but because there is a demand by people (particularly young people) to be able to make this type of content.
To speak on the demand for a bit, I think it’s likely super fun to make a TikTok. This has been pointed out by multiple people and shouldn’t be surprising. Making any silly video will likely be fun – but again that’s not why TikTok is owning this market. It’s because people feel okay with posting these videos and sharing them. In this way, TikTok is like Snapchat but public and global.
I feel that TikTok is unlocking isn’t a fad and pretty accurately reflects demand in the market. And the way to continue to grow and capture this market is to make it easier and easier to make this type of content and as a result of that, decrease the social cost of worse and worse content. What I don’t know is whether TikTok will continue to own this market – I think a number of other apps could copy it – Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, & YouTube being the top competitors.
The competition
If I had to take another guess, I would imagine that Instagram and Facebook would not be able to replicate this given that both platforms are focused around neat curation and signaling on profiles, and TikTok is super un-curated and low-quality content. I think Snapchat could do this but at this point, I doubt their exceptional abilities. I think the likeliest contender is YouTube – largely because they already have the existing infrastructure and system to host videos like these, often don’t have any strong curation or signaling behavior, have content like this already, and (most importantly) successful creators on apps like Tik Tok often end up on YouTube as the last destination.
