Under the siege, the real TikTok battlefield and a group of young people who are making money

Many people's circle of friends has been brushed by the "Yan" of TikTok and Zhou Shouzi.

On March 23, 2023, in Washington, D.C., TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi attended a hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives to respond to questions from U.S. lawmakers on "national security."

In addition to discussing the handsome young CEO, everyone began to care about TikTok's future in the North American market.

The conclusion of this hearing will determine the fate of other Chinese Internet companies seeking markets in the United States.

In February this year, Tik Tok fully launched the mall function in the Philippines, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, which also means that the trend and ambition of Tik Tok commercialization are becoming more and more obvious.

With the resumption of international flights and logistics, many domestic sellers have also eyed the Tik Tok pool of traffic depression, ready to enter the nuggets; Tik Tok is very similar to the domestic e-commerce model, which has also attracted the attention of many Internet practitioners.

Many people compare Tik Tok to Douyin in 2019, believing that it is full of opportunities and wealth, hiding the Internet's "last" train to get rich.

But at present, the signal of the United States to encircle Tik Tok has also worried many people who are optimistic about this outlet.

What about the real Tik Tok battlefield?

With questions, we found several practitioners who do e-commerce in Tik Tok and asked them about the real situation of Tik Tok's seizure of the market.

Here are the real stories about them:

Text | Chang Ningning

Edit | Zhuoran

When young people flock to Tik Tok for "re-employment"

Since the Internet layoffs began at the end of last year, Ren Jing obviously felt that her former colleagues were much more enthusiastic about her. From time to time, people ask her about her income as an anchor on Tik Tok, and praise her for her vision, hoping that Ren Jing can take them into the industry.

Ren Jing is currently an English-speaking streamer for Tik Tok UK.

In 2017, after graduating from a master's degree from an overseas famous school, Ren Jing entered the online education industry, and within a few years, the "double reduction" policy came.

That time coincided with Tik Tok's launch of the Global Live Guild and testing the waters of live streaming in the UK and Indonesia.

Figure | TikTok Indonesia live

After being moved by the domestic live broadcast turnover of hundreds of millions and the anchor's annual income of millions, Ren Jing became a Tik Tok anchor with her English advantages and cheerful personality.

Due to the time difference between China and the UK, Ren Jing's live broadcast time is from 6 am to 10 am, and after being an anchor, there is little contact with colleagues, and only "likes" are maintained.

Occasionally, Ren Jing will post some of her "explosive" circle of friends, and former colleagues who remain on the domestic Internet often leave messages below, in addition to expressing envy, they will also leave some worries about their uncertain future.

So when everyone found themselves at the end of the year, Ren Jing was not surprised, "When I think about it, I know that they have been laid off again, after all, the Internet environment at home and abroad is not good, and they are asking each other whether there are opportunities like the golden age of the Internet." ”

It's hard to say when the first batch of domestic gold diggers targeted the hot land of Tik Tok, but Tik Tok does have a huge imagination space at the moment.

In 2022, Tik Tok announced that its global monthly active users have exceeded 1 billion - which also means that TikTok has successfully entered the 1 billion monthly active users (MAU) club, and recently the top 5 applications with global user activity.

And Tik Tok took only 4 years to complete this feat.

"Tik Tok currently has few creators, and the content field is still in the blue ocean stage, about the level of domestic Douyin in 2018-2019," said Zhao Zi, who works as the operator of Tik Tok at a domestic cross-border e-commerce.

Compared with the number of excellent creators of more than 6 million in Douyin in China, Tik Tok faces a larger market, but only has more than 200,000 creators. This means that doing content on Tik Tok has less competition, a larger market, and higher platform subsidies.

Figure | TikTok launched the "Apollo Program" in the United States in February this year, which mainly incentivizes TikTok Shopping e-commerce live streaming in the United States

"This is a thing that can make money with hands," Ren Jingru said, "Compared with the domestic drama industry, it is really easy to be a TikTok anchor."

Domestic volumes are also a business opportunity on TikTok

Ren Jing and her colleagues are the ones who experienced the last glory of the Internet.

At that time, the scale of the online education industry was expanding rapidly, and new people came to report every day, and the company had to introduce regulations to centralize onboarding at a fixed time every week to improve efficiency.

Ren Jing still remembers the shock of watching the "crooked, headless" team when passing the corridor.

Like her, the young people waiting to join the job are also graduated from prestigious schools and are full of hope for the high salary and challenges of the Internet.

This is also the epitome of the high-speed era of the Internet.

Thanks to the popularity of domestic mobile phones, since 2010, the domestic Internet has opened an era of vigorous expansion, and the number of practitioners has also grown rapidly.

According to the statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics, the number of employed people in urban units in the information transmission, software and information technology service industries in the mainland was 1.86 million in 2010 and reached 4.55 million in 2019.

Coupled with the policy of Chinese concept stocks going overseas and localizing, the Internet has recruited a large number of international students in the local area, and has become the backbone of "going out" for a while.

However, with the peak of traffic and the lack of innovation vitality in the industry, the Internet high-growth Internet giants began a 4-year downsizing and layoff.

The double reduction policy that came in 2021 has released more than 10 million employed laborers and an increasing number of international students returning from the epidemic... The domestic job market was highly competitive for a while.

The foreign Internet environment is also not much clear. In 2022, the bursting of the Internet industry bubble has reached local companies in Silicon Valley, and many Internet companies have laid off employees.

With internet layoffs on the one hand, and a surplus of labor in the market, many people turned to search for new job opportunities.

With the mentality of "grabbing seats", many young people with a keen sense of smell decided to do cross-border e-commerce to pan for gold on Tik Tok.

"What's more, Tik Tok has considerable traffic subsidies for creators in the European and American markets," Ren said.

Many early Tik Tok users earned their first pot of gold by carrying videos, and since then, "experience stickers" such as monthly income of 20,000 and monthly income of 4,000 as a side business abound, which also intensifies the entrepreneurial filter of "Tik Tok", allowing many young people to see the road to prosperity.

In February this year, when Tik Tok announced that the Philippines, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries were fully online and cross-border merchants could also enter Tik Tok Shop, many domestic companies smelled the opportunity and began to set up a Tik Tok live broadcast team.

Nowadays, in many recruitment software in China, entering "Tik Tok" will find that many positions related to "Tik Tok" have appeared within two months.

Tik Tok sees that most of the areas it faces are non-Chinese regions, with few age restrictions, and even being an anchor is not as "rolled" as in China.

Ren Jing was 29 years old when she decided to become a Tik Tok anchor and did not have any live broadcast experience, which is already an "elderly practitioner" in the domestic live broadcast industry.

"But Tik Tok cares more about English proficiency and personality, and the background of studying abroad, appearance and age restrictions are far less than in China," Ren Jing said.

The rules are heavy

But in the blue ocean of Tik Tok, reality is far more skinny than imagined.

The first is the issue of risk encountered in operating in different countries.

Since the inception of Tik Tok, regulatory risks have not been broken, and there are even "rumors of bans" from time to time, which also casts a shadow on domestic watchers.

On the other hand, the main monetization methods of Tik Tok are content acquisition traffic subsidies and e-commerce, whether e-commerce is live streaming or video + small stores, or peddling to others for monetization, but all involve the problem of opening stores.

Opening a store is also the biggest threshold for Tik Tok.

Tik Tok's previous positioning is similar to Facebook, it is a platform for draining traffic, and users can guide fans to enter independent site transactions after posting content on it, that is, "Tik Tok + independent site" mode.

With the commercialization of Tik Tok, after the Tik Shop function was launched in many regions, it has now become semi-closed small stores and closed small stores, that is, orders need to be completed within the Tik Tok platform.

Tik Tok sites are different, and the restrictions on opening stores are also different, and the overall is much stricter than in China.

Like the current British small shops Chinese can be opened with Chinese ID cards, but the withdrawal requires local real-name withdrawal or official MCN agencies; Southeast Asia and other countries only support local opening; The United States uses an invitation system.

This involves Tik Tok's "sad past."

When Tik Tok launched its international store, it involved several sites such as the United Kingdom, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, and could not be opened at the same time, and could only open another site after meeting 100 US dollars. Therefore, many people will take the British pound settlement as the first stop.

As a result, the entry threshold for small cross-border shops in the UK was too low at that time, and even as long as they could provide a domestic business license and a photo of their legal person's ID card, they could apply for settlement.

The low threshold attracted a large influx of sellers, resulting in uneven quality of goods on the platform, and after the increase in customer complaints, Tik Tok also closed a large number of stores in the UK in April 2022, narrowed the self-registration channel, and suspended the review.

Although the channel was reopened in June of the same year, Tik Tok Shop's review was much stricter than before.

Therefore, many small stores still operate in the way of "Tik Tok + independent site", that is, using third-party plug-ins or building a shopping website by themselves to guide customers into transactions.

But with Tik Tok's own business ambitions, it is also deliberately blocking popular behavior.

Ren Jing said that from September 2022, when Tik Tok said "link" and "website" to the anchor in the live broadcast room, he would be forced to ban the broadcast, so Ren Jing could only hang the link of the independent site on the homepage.

"But local fans don't know where to place an order", for which Ren Jing also arranged several trays in the live broadcast room, "one of them asked how to buy, and the other answered to go to the homepage to click".

Moreover, independent sites need to be separately authorized to log in, and the conversion is not very ideal. In addition, the independent station service provider will charge fees according to transaction fees and transaction commissions, and many small businesses are discouraged from this, staying at the link of drainage and maintenance, waiting to see the changes.

But now raising a number is a thankless task in Tik Tok.

After the "Do the Number" team washed Tik Tok by carrying blood and carved up a huge amount of organic traffic. Tik Tok has also optimized its audit strategy for handling, and currently almost no traffic can be obtained through handling.

Therefore, the new Tik Tok editors must attract fans by mixing and cutting, original and other methods.

"But attracted, and then what?" Zhao Zi, who was holding several large sizes, asked rhetorically. Monetization is back to the challenge of opening a store.

Second, localization is also a difficult problem to bypass.

As a globally oriented app, Tik Tok will be subject to local supervision after entering different countries.

"But you never know when regulation will come," Ms. Zhao said.

In February this year, Tik Tok's US site carried out semi-closed-loop management of tax categories, and after February 28, gambling gadgets such as turntables were not allowed in the live broadcast room, and it was also forbidden to open mussels, blind boxes (unless authorized by the blind box company), dangling barrels (crystal category Lucky Scoop), rotating sushi, auctions and other games.

Many live broadcast rooms have been hit hard and have begun to seek transformation, and there are not a few live broadcasts across categories.

Cultural differences are also a threshold compared to control.

In November last year, a fan asked the anchor Sarah in the live broadcast room if she had any Christmas products.

Sara, who had never lived abroad, thought that the British, like Chinese, would only prepare relevant products before the holidays, so she ignored the inquiry, and it was not until two days later that Sarah realized that she had missed the opportunity when her opponent's live broadcast room began to sell Christmas series and make a lot of money.

Although she also launched new Christmas-related products later, "but 2 weeks later than the other party", and the sales were not as good as the other party.

In addition, different site countries have different acceptance of e-commerce and live broadcasting, so they also need to continue to explore in product selection and live broadcast content.

This is vividly reflected in Sarah's selection and live broadcast content.

Sarah's company has a layout in Southeast Asia and the UK, but British users obviously dislike the noisy sales method in China, plus the British live shopping habits have not been cultivated, the commercial atmosphere in the live broadcast room is not strong, always tepid, and the anchor is more in the form of chat; Southeast Asia, on the other hand, prefers low prices, explosive models, or even cheap enough that no one can live broadcast.

To this end, Sarah's team is constantly "starting new names" to study the likes of the locals. "Starting a new number" is also a new way for the domestic live broadcast team to bring Tik Tok, which means that if the live broadcast can never break through the data bottleneck and drain the transaction, it means that it has "failed" and needs to be abandoned and start over.

"Every time you do it again, you need to make 1,000 fans to start a live broadcast", for which Sarah's company also has a huge branch in raising and purchasing numbers.

In addition, the current trend of younger users on Tik Tok and limited spending power have also led to many merchants operating at a loss.

This is something that both Ren Jing and Sarah have a deep understanding.

"Many places have not yet accepted the habit of live shopping, we can only attract traffic through low prices," Sarah said, explaining that the company's current good products sold in the Tik Tok UK are priced at around £10, "and even the shipping costs are more expensive than the goods". In order to get as many orders as possible, Sarah often runs full giveaways — such as £10 or more and a small gift — to attract users and attract more traffic.

But the price paid was that the company made little money.

"If the price is not advantageous, why should someone else come to buy your things?" Ren Jing asked rhetorically, and the low price has almost become the consensus of all Tik Tok merchants.

But low prices do not mean peace of mind, Zhao Zi is most afraid of hearing about returns, "sometimes as soon as the buyer returns, the freight will be pasted dozens of yuan."

Zhao Zi laughed at himself, "Sometimes we also feel like we are doing charity, 'giving' things to foreign buyers." ”

But there are also TIk Tok businesses that are not losing money, such as doing Tik Tok training.

At the same time as Tik Tok poured into the gold diggers, many seniors who claimed to have "succeeded" in making money on Tik Tok began to pass on their experience.

While promoting Tik Tok's traffic dividend and easy monetization, they peddle traps Tik Tok courses, with fees ranging from 4,890 yuan to tens of thousands of yuan. Some mentors, who have not even opened a small shop on Tik Tok, "claim to accept apprentices."

"In this way, Tik Tok still has a lot of opportunities," Sarah said in an update on her social platform on today's work.

She doesn't really know how long the company can last at a loss on Tik Tok, but she thinks she can take apprentices if she has the opportunity.