On the evening of March 23, local time in the United States, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi went to Capitol Hill to participate in the hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and responded to a series of controversial issues raised by members of the US Congress. During the hearing, Zhou emphasized that TikTok is a platform for freedom of expression, transparency, and independent oversight by third parties, and has always made the safety of young people a top priority.
The day before the hearing, a coalition of more than 30 TikTok bloggers spearheaded the U.S. Capitol, holding signs calling on lawmakers to "stay with TikTok." According to NBC, TikTok content creators participating in the event came from all ages and walks of life, including teenage students, entrepreneurs, and more.
These two developments send the same signal: the pressure from regulators has intensified, and TikTok's survival in the United States is once again under consideration. However, this hearing and protest also outlined the tearing picture of American politics and people, the important position of TikTok, and the unwillingness of the American technology community: Silicon Valley, which prides itself on the center of the technology universe, has never been able to make an excellent short video application.
TikTok, which cannot be killed or learned, has long become an eternal pain in the hearts of American technology giants. For them, the most important thing now is not to force TikTok away - review their R&D and operation strategies, and reflect on why they failed to benchmark TikTok's products.
(Image via UNsplash)
Zhou Shou's tongue fights, and TikTok is walking on thin ice
The hearing on the evening of March 23 did not lead to any important conclusions, but Zhou Shouzi must have felt pressure from all sides.
According to Forward, the entire hearing lasted more than five hours, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, made several sharp remarks. Rep. Kat Cammack, another key figure in the House, even issued a lengthy and cumbersome criticism.
In the face of US lawmakers' four major allegations against TikTok, including the safety of minors, data privacy security, the harm of short videos to the real world, and content manipulation, Zhou Shouzi replied one by one.
In response to regulators' concerns about teens' addiction to short videos, TikTok has launched features such as a 60-minute/day limit for underage users in recent months. In addition, in his speech, Zhou Shouzi also repeatedly emphasized TikTok's efforts to ensure data security and the transparency of platform user data collection.
Not long ago, TikTok launched a security program codenamed "Project Texas" and has spent $1.5 billion to build data security protections and has partnered with tech giants such as Oracle. In Europe, TikTok also launched "Project Clover," which is expected to spend $1.2 billion a year to secure user data and promises to store data locally.
However, for well-known reasons, it is unknown whether TikTok's efforts will have an effect. Instead, Silicon Valley giants can't wait to share the fruits of victory: wooing high-quality creators and weakening TikTok's content advantage is the latest strategy.
YouTube has earlier announced that it will relax partner eligibility restrictions in 2023 and update its sharing rules to allow short video creators on the platform to make profits through advertising. At the same time, the Creator Music function is launched to open the music use rights to creators and help the latter improve the quality of content.
Similarly, Instagram's Reels has also optimized its ad sharing mechanism, introducing more static, bottom ads, and allowing creators to decide where to put their ads. In addition, Reels Surprise, a creator incentive program launched last November, offers an additional $10,000 per week to 150 premium creators and is currently only available in the United States.
But are these measures enough to help Reels and YouTube steal TikTok?
According to the Institute of Value (ID: jiazhiyanjiusuo), the answer is no. The migration of creators and users is not synchronized, and YouTubers spending money to support bloggers can certainly enrich their content ecology, but it is not realistic to increase the user base in a short period of time.
At present, TikTok has exceeded 150 million monthly active activities in the United States, an increase of 50% over 2020. As Zhou Shouzi said at the hearing, TikTok is integrated into the lives and work of half of Americans. The social bonds and careers they build through short videos are not something that can be cut off all at once.
It is an unchangeable fact that American technology companies have missed the short video outlet. Even if they win TikTok non-commercially and monopolize the domestic market, it will be difficult for them to truly outperform their rivals — and this is evident in the stories of Google and its search engine imitators around the world.
Only this time, the positions of the two sides were reversed, and the Silicon Valley giant became the losing side.
TikTok has only been in the U.S. for a few short years, and Silicon Valley seems to have lost an entire era. This begs the question: How did all this happen?
TikTok has been in the United States for five years without encountering a single opponent that can fight
In fact, TikTok and Douyin were not the originators of short videos – the United States was the birthplace of short videos and realized the potential of this blank market earlier.
Born in 2010, Viddy is the world's first short video app, which only provides basic functions such as instant shooting, fast production and sharing. At its peak, Viddy once reached cooperation with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and the number of users exceeded 50 million.
After tasting the sweetness of traffic, in the next three years, Keek, Cinemagram, Vine, Mixbit and other applications have been launched one after another, and entrepreneurs seem to smell a new outlet. However, at this time, the US short video industry was still in the reckless stage, and did not run out of the head platform with crushing advantages. The only thing to delight the Silicon Valley giants is that they are still one step ahead of their Chinese counterparts — it wasn't until 2014 that the country's first short video app, Meipai, was born.
But the story that followed, we all knew very well. In February 2017, ByteDance acquired the American short video app Flipagram for $50 million, and changed its name to TikTok in May of the same year and launched it overseas, opening a period of growth myth after another. At this time, the US short video market also entered a new stage: that is, the era of Silicon Valley giants teaming up against TikTok.
Looking at the chronicle of the short video industry in the United States, technology giants such as Meta, Google, and Snap have left their footprints on it, and TikTok has also encountered various opponents after landing in the United States. Among them, Zuckerberg has been the vanguard against Silicon Valley against TikTok, and Meta at his helm is also the most enthusiastic Silicon Valley technology company that tinkers with short video projects.
At the end of 2018, following the pace of TikTok, Facebook released a short video application Lasso; Instagram soon came up with an algorithmic recommendation mechanism, page settings and even publicity methods that fully benchmarked TikTok's Reels. The difference is that Lasso takes an independent development route and does not rely too much on Facebook to divert traffic, while Reels is highly tied to Instagram.
Zuckerberg may have taken into account the differences in graphic social and short video users, the difference in usage habits, and the growth rate of Facebook users at that time was not bad, so he had no intention of changing the original user ecology. But the drawbacks are also obvious: TikTok is too popular, and it is too difficult to make a short video application from scratch and pry TikTok away.
In order to avoid the edge of competitors, Lasso also tried to develop a market with a low penetration rate of TikTok, and then return to the United States after it developed and expanded. Unfortunately, the trade-in for space doesn't work at all, and even though Facebook invests a lot of promotional resources, Lasso's user growth has not improved.
The data shows that after one year of launch, Lasso's total downloads were only 425,000, and its peak was only one million. In the same period, TikTok's downloads have exceeded 600 million, approaching Facebook. After tasting the lesson, Instagram's Reels took another extreme approach: frantically diverting traffic from the two ace apps of Instagram and Facebook.
On Instagram's Stories, Facebook's Create a post and other pages, there are Reels upload and share portals, Zuckerberg tried to fully open up its major applications, through the internal circulation of traffic to promote the scale of Reels users in a short period of time. Even after the full transformation of the metaverse, the support for Reels has not waned.
However, in terms of user size, download volume and other dimensions, Reels is only living slightly better than Lasso, and there is still a very big gap with TikTok. Always embedded in Instagram mobile, the lack of independent brand recognition has obscured Reels' positioning.
After the vanguard of Facebook and Instagram collapsed, other players began to adjust their playing styles and became more cautious. The U.S. short video market has entered a short truce, and TikTok is the only one. To put it bluntly, TikTok has landed in the United States for more than five years, and has not even encountered an opponent that can fight.
Can't read young people, Silicon Valley giants missed short video outlets
Looking back at the evolution of TikTok in the United States and the development of the short video industry in the United States, the giants of Silicon Valley cannot be described as working hard. But it wasn't until later, when pressure from regulators put TikTok on thin ice, and the United States still didn't run a short video app that could challenge its dominance.
Zuckerberg, the "little prodigy of Silicon Valley" with countless halos on his head, may also want to know why he has repeatedly lost?
Objectively speaking, the rise of TikTok has a certain relationship with first-mover advantage and technology, but this is certainly not the most core factor.
TikTok's excellence is only the first to combine short videos and algorithms, combine user interests and content creation, and realize the transformation from users looking for videos to actively matching users. But algorithm recommendation does not have too high a technical threshold, Meta, Google, Snap and other technology companies can be completely copied. As for the eye-catching vertical screen display, information flow push and other forms, Reels and Lasso have also learned them all.
(Lasso's display page is similar in height to TikTok, image from MakeMeReach)
According to the Institute of Value (ID: jiazhiyanjiusuo), the main reason for TikTok's popularity is that it is good at capturing human nature and constructing a subcultural circle of Generation Z young people.
As we all know, TikTok's earliest out-of-the-loop was based on Generation Z. According to data from Pacific Securities, by the end of 2020, TikTok's penetration rate among young people aged 18-29 in the United States exceeded 50%, and 32.5% of the platform's users were in the 10-19 age group, followed by 29.5% of 20-29 years old.
For this group of young people who first came into contact with TikTok, TikTok is a spiritual self-reserved place that belongs to their circle and a new totem that is different from "old apps" such as Facebook and Instagram, and it is also a public platform that is not utilitarian and simply shows itself.
(Image from Pacific Securities)
TikTok is also well aware of this, and its features and push rules focus on supporting "whites" rather than professional bloggers and institutions. For example, TikTok was one of the first short video apps to go online with lip syncing tools, which makes it easier to remake videos, even for creators without any experience and expertise.
Even if the user base continues to expand and commercialization is put on the agenda, the principles of TikTok have not changed. In contrast, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube seem to be making short videos the traditional way. Their apps learned TikTok's algorithmic recommendation mechanism, but they couldn't learn mind-reading for Gen Z.
Nowhere is this more evident than in YouTube. At the time of the launch of Shorts, YouTube, which sits on 2 billion monthly active users around the world, was seen as a new hope for the American tech community to snipe TikTok. But the problem is that Shorts, which has hyped up its UCG model, is still mainly supporting top bloggers after its launch, and has not become a platform for Gen Z to express themselves like TikTok.
Not pure, it is what many users say about Shorts, Lasso, and Reels. True, they were meant to fight TikTok with a purpose. Quickly increasing user size and market share is its number one task, and creating popular content and top creators is a direct way to increase popularity in a short period of time. But in this way, it goes against the original intention of "allowing ordinary people to show their lives".
Of course, Gen Z will grow old, TikTok may be disliked by a new generation of young people, and short videos will always turn off. But if the lessons of this battle are not learned, the Silicon Valley giants may miss out on more.
Write at the end
Despite the pressure, TikTok is actively looking for a turnaround. After attending the hearing in the House of Representatives, Zhou Shouzi issued an internal letter in response to various suspicions and encouraged employees.
"Your work over the past two years or so has been, and will continue to be, a key force underpinning these important efforts (data security, youth protection), and these gains will not be diminished by the atmosphere at the hearing."
Data security and youth protection are the focus of foreign regulators' frantic sniping at TikTok, and TikTok has shown maximum sincerity in improving these two links. However, these efforts will not necessarily impress politicians with different positions and complex interests, and there is a big question mark about TikTok's future in overseas markets.
But TikTok has done everything it can, and it's never under its control. And as mentioned earlier, even if TikTok abdicates, it will be difficult for the giants of Silicon Valley to undertake the spillover dividend, and the short video market will only return to chaos at most.
The only certainty is that TikTok's success cannot be replicated today. Losing TikTok is never a good thing for users either.