Story of Tik Tok
The owner of TikTok is the Chinese company Bytedance, recognized in October 2018 by Bloomberg as the most expensive startup in the world. The organization was valued at 75 billion dollars, in second place – the global taxi service Uber.
Bytedance in founded Zhang Yiming in 2012. At that time he was twenty-nine. Now he is included in the ranking of the most influential people in the business world under 40 years old.
The startup’s first product was the Toutiao news aggregator, whose unique “chip” was support for artificial intelligence: the algorithm learned from the user’s habits and chose the right materials for them. You won’t surprise anyone like that now, but at that time the idea was more or less innovative.
Most startups in China usually go under the wing of major Chinese holdings, and ByteDance has taken a different path. In 2016, they released TikTok, but then it was still called Douyin and its target audience was in China. Even then, its first local stars, memes and its own atmosphere appeared in it.
Musical.ly and TikTok
We move a little back to the past and recall the Musical.ly application. In 2014, it was presented to users. Initially, it was completely different from what it is remembered: the working title is Cicada, the goal is enlightenment with the help of “long” five-minute (!) Educational videos. Later, this idea was abandoned for several reasons: disinterest in the audience, difficulty in production (it is difficult to find experts, it is even more difficult to fit their thoughts in 5 minutes) and, possibly, huge risks. But later, as the legends say, Zhu saw on the street how schoolchildren grimaced to music, took pictures and put it on the Internet. So there was a karaoke application where the user can record a 15-second clip under the soundtrack and put it in a separate social network. On the day the application was launched, it was already used by 500 people.
Over the next ten months, the app continued to grow its audience. One of the key decisions was a simple but ingenious move: to insert a logo with a website address and application name in each video. Thus, all the reloads on YouTube and videos that went beyond the application immediately had a label about the “source”, which allowed a sharp increase in the audience. Her local nugget stars appeared in her, celebrities also came to the ready (Selena Gomez, Meghan Trainor, Jason Derulo and other musicians). Functionality allowed you to share videos, communicate and record duets.
In 2016, the Vine service, which has no significance to the events described above, to people and sites, was closed. It was unlikely that he was the main competitor to Musical.ly, but he was able to occupy the niche of the short video service and definitely “led away” part of the audience.
In 2017-2018, the Music.li service was purchased, and later merged with TickTok: a risky, but logical decision. Applications (and this is primarily mobile applications, not sites or “programs”) were similar in functionality, idea and target audience.
Everyone benefited from the deal: the audience grew in the USA, Europe, China, and all over the world. By the number of downloads, the application is now one of the most popular in both the AppStore and Google Play (at least in its categories). Fewer people use Twitter, Skype, and Viber now than the short music video application. What do you think?
Why is popular Tik Tok?
YouTube : by itself!
For what they do not like
Haters do not like TikTok for intrusive advertising, endless dances and musical accompaniment, repeated opening of the lips to the finished track (the so-called “lip-sync”), flash mobs with strange movements and other things. TickTok allows you to feel old even if you are twenty-five: there are younger users around, and it’s really difficult to understand why you should do this if you have YouTube, Instagram, and a million sites and other useful things.
And most people who have not even really heard about the application are shocked to learn that by popularity it has already outperformed everyone it could. And many did not even know about him at all: he simply was not necessary, it was only entertaining. And the “entertainment” is more than anything else: politicians and journalists lead tweets, more or less all the stars on Instagram (and even sometimes post not only their own selfies there), YouTube educates and educates (among other things), social networks allow correspondence. Here, only a hobby, nothing more.
And who knows what awaits us in the future: will it disappear like something fleeting like Vines, will it spend a decade with us, and will leave after (like ICQ), or will it be with us forever (like a Facebook, existing by the standards of the Internet for ages ) What option are you hoping for?