TikTok, the Asian wave that threatens Facebook

We are seeing the collapse of Facebook. For now in Asia. Data on the rise in popularity of products by ByteDance, one of China's leading app developers and distributors, suggests that the continent is already lost to Facebook.

1. TikTok Success in App Rankings

Last year, this social app passed the one billion downloads mark worldwide (1). TikTok (2) Instagram has more than doubled (444 million downloads), which is now the last stop for younger users.

2. TikTok - app site

TikTok originated in China as douyinBasically, it is a social music platform with the ability for users to create and post short videos (up to 15 seconds). This is not the only product of the Chinese company. ByteDance. He also creates more ambitious products, such as a news and other content aggregator. Toutiaooffered in Western markets as TopBuzz.

meanwhile he has hardly created anything that could be called a hit since the last decade. His new, still very popular sites, Instagram and WhatsApp, were not invented by the Zuckerberg company, but purchased for billions of dollars..

The inefficiency is demonstrated by an example Lasso, launched late last year, is a social app that allows users to watch and create short films, usually amateur music videos. The app is almost identical to TikTok, but falls short of the original in popularity among teens. At present, ByteDance seems to be ahead of the blue platform both in terms of the quality of the strategy and the level of understanding of the needs of young Internet users.

Yes, China is a special market where Facebook or Instagram remain unavailable due to censorship. However, just over 40% of app downloads in 2018 came from users in democratic India, which has so far been dominated by the stable Facebook, the main social platform in the form of the aforementioned Instagram and WhatsApp.

Worse, expansion TikTok begins to move beyond Asia and into Zuckerberg territory. The number of Chinese app downloads in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store is already in the tens of millions in the US (3). Such data was provided by SensorTower, an application market research company. At the same time, Facebook Lasso downloaded only 70 thousand. users. While TikTok still lagged behind WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Facebook itself in terms of downloads in 2018, according to Sensor Tower data, the example of "desperate" imitation by creating its not-so-successful clone clearly signals Facebook's fear of the expansive Chinese.

3. The rise of TikTok in the US

Community is different

For those who have not yet been convinced by Facebook, let alone Instagram, TikTok may seem like something completely incomprehensible or even bizarre. Its users are mostly teenagers who record videos of them singing and dancing to popular hits.

An interesting functionality is the ability to edit films, including in the sense of "social", which is the work of more than one person. The platform strongly encourages users to collaborate with other users through the so-called video response mechanism or the vocal-visual "duets" feature.

For TikTok "producers", the app offers to use everything from popular music videos to short snippets of series, movies, or other memes created on TikTok. You can join the "challenge" to create something or take part in the creation of a dance meme. When memes and their creation on many platforms get bad press and sometimes even get banned, ByteDance bases their whole idea of ​​activism on them. Like many similar apps, TikTok also offers a range of effects, filters, and stickers that you can use when creating content. In addition, everything is extremely simple here. You don't have to be an expert in editing to create video clips that sometimes fall out quite neatly.

When a user opens the app, the first thing they see is not the notification feed from their friends like on Facebook or , but the "For You" page. This is a channel created by AI algorithms based on content that the user has already interacted with. So people who are wondering what they could post today are immediately recruited to participate in group competitions, hashtags, or to view popular songs.

Moreover The TikTok algorithm does not associate the user with one group of friends, but still tries to transfer him to new groups, topics, activities. This is perhaps the biggest difference and innovation from other platforms..

4. Zhang Yiming, Head of ByteDance

Catch up and drive away Silicon Valley

Before TikTok grew by almost 300% in a year, it was called a "lip-sync" app, that is, related to karaoke, but online. Many internet users who came across it also resembled Snapchat due to its general childishness. However, who remembers the minivideo Vine service offered by Twitter a few years ago, the Chinese application may seem familiar. This is just another attempt to popularize mini-video content.

Experts note that it is not yet possible to talk about “TikTok stars” as well-known YouTubers, but the mechanisms for gaining popularity are inexorable. If the application continues to develop at the same pace as before, the birth of "tiktok celebrities» Seems inevitable.

True, there are vague reports that the application, in addition to the youthful and joyful side, also has a “dark” one - the world of spy algorithms and stalkers, people using other users, and distributors of illegal content. However, no one has proven this. Definitely TikTok has quite a lot strong privacy protection (unlike some other famous applications).

Parents or users themselves can set the account to private mode, hide it from search, disable commenting and uploading, prevent interaction and limit messaging. TikTok launches at the same time check ad - in short forms, the so-called. , i.e. videos that precede the main movies. For various brands, the group of users of the site is certainly attractive, although such a young platform must be careful with such actions so as not to scare away users. The example of Facebook, which in the early years of its existence did not rush into obsessive commercialization, is indicative.

The success of ByteDance is also the success of Chinese thought in IT. If it beats Facebook, Instagram, and other sites on their own American soil, it will surely be a meaningful victory for the Chinese over Silicon Valley.

By the way, ByteDance just opened their office there. After the impact, he also plans. It is said that this is the biggest dream and the main goal of Zhang Yiming, the company's CEO. It is worth recalling that Facebook once had such plans and was even implemented. However, it was a big failure. If the ByteDance device is built and successfully implemented, Zuckerberg could take another painful blow.

A few bitter pills

A deeper examination of TikTok's "fun" content quickly leads to the conclusion that it is mostly entertainment for teenagers from the so-called Generation Z.

Will they grow out of TikTok? Or maybe the popular platform will mature, like Facebook, which ten years ago was also perceived as a stupid form of pastime, but has grown into a completely serious and important social and political form of communication? We'll see.

So far, the application has encountered a completely adult world. In the course of public debate in some countries (including China and India), opinions have emerged that TikTok contributes to the distribution of illegal content, including pornography. Access has been denied blocked in Indonesia already in July 2018, in Bangladesh in November 2018 and in April 2019 in India. The decision of the Indian authorities was especially painful, because the application already had about 120 million users.

So maybe app issues that owners probably don't manage to control and moderate will delay Facebook's execution? By the way, the Chinese have felt in their own skin what it feels like when someone interferes and blocks the development of external services in their field, which they have been practicing with foreign structures for years.