Produced | Tiger Sniff Commercial, Consumer and Mobile Group
The author | Huang Qingchun
The title image | Visual China
TikTok couldn't hold back, and Zuckerberg made a desperate bet.
Last weekend (January 16), according to the British technology media TechRadar reported that Instagram is testing the vertical sliding function in Turkey and Brazil - users can swipe up and down short videos like TikTok when they swipe Instagram, which is undoubtedly the real hammer of Instagram's "TikTok".
Although it is currently uncertain when Instagram officially launched the vertical sliding function, since the short video trend set off by TikTok swept the world, the anxiety of american social giants has become increasingly strong - whether it is Youtube launching Shorts, Snapchat launching Spotlight or Instagram launching Reels function, it has been interpreted as "the US giant's defensive counterattack against TikTok".
For example, The Information has written that YouTube's Launch of Shorts is "the most serious effort silicon valley tech company has made to combat the rise of TikTok to date"; the Daily Mail is more blunt, "For TikTok, which has 800 million users, both Shorts and Reels features are 'clones'." ”
Frankly speaking, the United States has Google/Meta/Amazon, China has bred BATJ; the United States has Uber/Apple, and China has killed Didi and Huawei. BAT has been bathed in the afterglow of American giants and secretly developed, not to mention the small brothers who grew up in the shadow of BAT. ByteDance is different, TikTok single-handedly reshaped the short video landscape, spawned a global entertainment platform, and left a strong mark in the history of mobile Internet.
Zuckerberg "copied" TikTok three times
This isn't the first time Zuckerberg has implemented a "cloning tactic" on TikTok on the product side.
Time to pull back to 2018, when TikTok monthly life passed the 100 million mark, Instagram has secretly deployed targeted "fortifications" - according to the US media The Verge, Instagram in the update of the vertical information flow push into a horizontal arrangement, users need to swipe left and right to see new news. However, the time was not ripe, and Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, apologized afterwards, saying, "This was originally a small-scale test, but it was accidentally spread." ”
In the same year, Meta was exploded in the internal incubation of short video products Lasso to delay the speed of Douyin's encroachment on the local market in the United States. As for The Product of Lasso, whether the core gameplay "vertical screen", "swipe up and down", "with popular BGM" or "like", "share" and other product features are obviously "cloned" TikTok.
Screenshot of Lasso's product page
Shortly thereafter, Instagram launched a new feature called Reels — 15-second short videos, support for adding BGM, and built-in filters and special effects. New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz commented, "Reels confuses me... It's as if Instagram has crammed all of the current features on Stories onto a new page for no apparent reason. ”
As it turns out, Zuckerberg took a small look at TikTok. The technology media "Silicon Rabbit Race" once wrote, "TikTok's biggest advantage lies in the core algorithm of the AI system, video display technology and integrated financial payment function, which is not only TikTok's secret weapon, but also the root cause of its success at sea." Obviously, short video applications including Youtube Shorts and Moj have captured market opportunities and vulnerabilities, but whether they can subvert TikTok depends on whether the product really touches the core of TikTok's operation. ”
What is the core of TikTok's operation? Commenting on Instagram and TikTok, Well-known technology commentator Ben Thompson said, "Instagram is more about 'sharing moments', TikTok is about 'creating moments'. ”
Let's talk about the meaning of Instagram sharing, for a long time Instagram was a trend vane, and the popular things on the platform have their own hashtags, which can easily spread to other platforms and have a certain influence in real life. However, with the proliferation of users, Instagram has gradually transformed into a "hybrid" of social and interest circles, especially the alienation of phenomena such as "ins wind" has gradually begun to dissuade ordinary people.
As for Facebook, for a long time in the past, it relied on the social graph to complete the construction of the interest circle layer, but when this weak relationship is transformed into a strong relationship, the product gene inherently has limitations - when users try to treat the social circle as an interest circle, they will find that paying attention to a certain content has to withstand all its dynamics, and problems such as information redundancy, excessive interruption, and interest differences will become increasingly prominent.
In contrast, TikTok strips away the pressure of social maintenance, not so much a social network as an entertainment platform, and behind this is the "interest gathering" - rich UGC content flows out of the circle through the ecology of the two creations, which is actually a very rare product ability.
After reviewing the rise of TikTok, a key node is to acquire Musical.ly and then reshape its products to make it a "new species" that penetrates the barriers of Chinese and Western cultures. A large part of the reason why Musical.ly has become popular among American teenagers is due to the insight and innovation of the functional side, that is, the "lip-syncing" visual creativity has greatly reduced the user threshold (special effects and filters replace the traditional editing software Pr/AE).
However, the Musical.ly of strong entertainment attributes is still not mainstream in the application market, and the center of the stage is still the major applications of the Meta camp.
Things began to change after ByteDance integrated Douyin's strong algorithm recommendation with Musical.ly product innovation. According to ByteDance's internal disclosure, the number of hours users are active on the app has doubled. In this process, the recommendation algorithm detonated the "ecological reproduction ability" of content - users - two creations, TikTok became a source of video creativity, and YouTube and Instagram Reels became a distribution channel for users.
In addition, TikTok has also grown two capabilities: one ability is called social language, the other is called data intelligence - social language can maintain the user's stickiness to the platform, if you want to stop using, it means that you will lose a lot of common topics between friends and colleagues; data intelligence refers to the continuous improvement of the platform's learning ability under the support of algorithms, that is, users enjoy the extreme convenience brought by the mobile Internet wave, but also make the data trajectory become the Achilles heel that is difficult for individuals to escape.
Obviously, these new TikTok-based interaction methods and product capabilities are not available to Instagram and Facebook.
Moreover, Douyin in China is just based on the user's interest preferences for accurate "feeding", users through immersion in it to get a steady stream of cool feelings to "kill time", and TikTok in the European and American market community attributes are obvious, and is a product that is completely suitable for young people to obtain information and expression.
The New York Times once wrote that "TikTok has become an important platform for young people to express their creativity and maintain interpersonal communication, especially as the election approaches, TikTok has become a channel for Gen Z activists and politically minded young people to organize and distribute political information." ”
From this, Adam Mosseri, executive director of Instagram, once said, "We will put more 'recommended content' that users don't pay attention to into the user's home page feed", which shows that the recommendation algorithm is gradually infiltrating into the genes of Instagram.
The topic pulled back to Instagram's initiative to "clone" TikTok on the core gameplay this time, which shows that the Meta social empire is anxious and unwilling to speak for products in the short video era.
A "war" that cannot be lost
Previously, the Wall Street Journal had revealed that "Facebook has a new technology tracking system 'Early Bird' within facebook, which uses plagiarism or acquisition to block potential startups in the market, thereby maintaining Facebook's own social oligarchy status" - this may be one of the reasons why Meta can continue to expand the social graph sphere of influence and stand firm.
However, zuckerberg did not worry too much about this when the TikTok user surge in 2018-2019, when he believed in an internal meeting, "The reason why TikTok is popular is mainly the result of spending money on promotion, once the promotion is stopped, the retention rate will decline." ”
It was Zuckerberg's arrogance and contempt for TikTok that provided a window into time for savage growth.
Although the failure of countless Chinese products to go to sea has proved that the farther the cultural distance between the two countries, the greater the difficulty faced by products when competing in the market in another country (WeChat once tried to break into the US market, but eventually only became popular among Chinese groups), especially chinese products to occupy a place in the complex geopolitical, cultural differences and legal and regulatory systems of the United States, and the difficulty has increased sharply.
But TikTok is an exception, which has successfully completed the localization breakthrough on the basis of product subversion.
On the one hand, multi-strategy operation drives content production. For example, in 2018 Musical.ly actively drained the US market to complete a wave of explosive growth (allowing watermarked videos to be downloaded and uploaded through YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and other channels); such as actively inviting local pop stars to settle in, Kinoshita Yuki, Rimi Ishihara, E-Girls for the local market user conversion effect is obvious.
On the other hand, ByteDance does not hesitate to spend huge sums of money to pave the way for product expansion. According to the data, TikTok's advertising spending in the United States in 2019 soared from $1 billion in 2018 to about $4 billion, and the promotion of TikTok was densely packed on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook that year - it was under the marketing offensive that swept the whole network that diverse user groups/subculture groups began to pour into TikTok.
TikTok's recommendation algorithm can not only help users complete the link of interest circles, but also distinguish different circles. In this regard, the American technology blogger Eugene Wei described TikTok's algorithm as the sorting hat in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. "While the magic hat inductively assigns Hogwarts students to Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin House, TikTok's algorithm is much more complex, dividing users into dozens of subcultural groups."
Under the setting of the "sorting hat", TikTok becomes a fast and efficient matching system - as the geometric multiples of user data are superimposed, its algorithm recommendations are more and more accurate, and the interaction between the audience and the content is more efficient.
In addition, TikTok also fully decentralizes local operations. Yu Czech, head of Market Expansion in Japan at TikTok, once said in an interview, "In terms of development budget, the company has given him great power, almost how many batches to report. ”
Moreover, TikTok's expansion map has local offices throughout the country, which not only recruits executives from Disney, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Sony, but also employs a large number of local employees and international students. In this regard, Zhang Yiming said in an interview with Qian Yingyi, dean of Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, "Our strategy is to globalize products and localize content. ”
It is equivalent to saying that remote collaboration, office system, management system, and even many underlying basic capabilities are being built synchronously, coupled with the acquisition of local teams and local operations, which makes TikTok produce a huge synergy under the blessing of algorithms, organization and operation.
Thanks to this, according to App Annie's survey data, in 2020, TikTok is already the app with the longest average user time in the United States, and Meta's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger can only rank 2 to 5. It can be seen that TikTok's growth rate is significantly faster than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other star products, and it has grown into a behemoth under the eyes of Meta.
Moreover, TikTok is full of momentum in the struggle for the global short video social map. According to Sensor Tower data, in July 2021, TikTok's total downloads on the global App Store and Google Play exceeded 3 billion times (this is the first non-Meta app to achieve this data); according to the news of the US technology company Cloudflare on December 20, 2021, TikTok surpassed Google to become the world's most visited Internet site.
At this point, Zuckerberg's coveting of short videos and his jealousy of TikTok have gone hand in hand, and it is difficult to say which emotion is more. Especially when TikTok is attacking one country after another, the rising star has created a substantial threat to the old social oligarch Meta in the wave of graphic evolution to short videos - TikTok's growth curve has become steeper, and its time plunder of Meta users has become more and more obvious.
As a result, the NGO "Center for Responsive Politics in the United States" revealed that in the first half of 2020, Facebook spent more on lobbying than any other company, and the focus of the lobbying was to persuade the government to regulate TikTok.
"Facebook was so annoyed that their product couldn't beat TikTok that it began to bring that competition to a geopolitical war of words to get lawmakers in Washington to wrestle with TikTok." A former Facebook employee once revealed it to Buzzfeed.
In the face of Zuckerberg's "small moves", kevin Mayer, the former CEO of TikTok, publicly accused in a blog post, "TikTok welcomes competition, but I hope that everyone can focus on providing users with quality services, through a fair and open way." Instead of using malicious attacks like Facebook, it packages its actions as patriotic in order to make TikTok disappear from the U.S. market. ”
In this regard, Shen Yi, a professor in the Department of International Politics at Fudan University, said in an interview with the Global Times, "Zuckerberg is a pure businessman, and he has previously shown various pro-China moves, hoping to obtain market benefits from China." But after some effort, it did not get what it wanted. Therefore, his denial of Chinese Internet companies is also due to the needs of his own market interests. ”
It can be seen that in this era of god-making and disenchantment at the same time, Zuckerberg's eyes under the aura are cloudy, cunning is full of business, and after wrapping up in the warm fur of capital, he is always playing a shrewd businessman role.
Zuckerberg once explained to cfos the reasons for acquiring Instagram, "There are network effects around social products that create a limited number of different social mechanisms, and once someone wins on a particular mechanism, it will be difficult for others to replace them without doing something different."
Nowadays, the words are true.
Tiktok has the upper hand in mechanics, and meta's advantages established under the old order are being challenged to be deconstructed. Especially as TikTok continues to eat away at user attention and time, advertising resources are also migrating towards TikTok.
Further, TikTok has found a shortcut to reshape the interest map, and in the process of its penetration from young people to pan-populations, user scale, monetization ability and influence are infinitely approaching the role of rulemaker in the short video era, which is enough to arouse the all-round vigilance of American technology companies.