TikTok famous: How the app is turning teenagers into celebrities | Hacker News Reader

TikTok famous: How the app is turning teenagers into celebrities

vox.com

60 pointslaurex41 comments

The fact that this app came out of China and not Silicon Valley, when it was halfway there with Vine before killing it, seriously makes me question the long-term sustainability of social/media apps from SV in the future. The era that gave us Youtube and Facebook is likely coming to a close.

What I feel is more interesting, is that TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads. This is directly at odds with the SV playbook for social media apps which relies mostly on viral and network effects boosted by growth hacks built directly into the product.

Good point. I never noticed that. Makes sense: lots of those baked-in "growth hacks" can sometimes be a double-edged sword and can be user hostile.

>TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads

weird everyone my age (20s) and younger know of tiktok through twitter/youtube

never new tiktok had ads on fb, weird for them to target boomers

FB and boomers?

Only makes me reinforce my belief that generation classifications are mostly bullshit.

Boomers are the only people I see using FB. Maybe a few millennials who are trapped so deep in social media addiction that they use it to supplement the 23 hours a day they spend on Instagram.

I'm smack there in the middle of what people call "millennials" and everyone I know my age +/- 5 is on Facebook. Some of them a bit more on Instagram nowadays.

I'd say it's a gradient.

40+: Pretty much only Facebook

30-40: mainly Facebook, slight uptick in Instagram use

20-30: mix of Facebook and Instagram, some Snapchat

12-20: mix of Instagram and Snapchat, some very slight Facebook use

If you count WhatsApp as social media: universal with 90%+ penetration among all age groups

Facebook is still huge in College

Source: am in college

What age would you guess a "Boomer" is? You might be surprised to realize they are mostly in their 70s. Fairly certain Facebook's user base is not almost exclusively 70+ year olds

Vine was unprofitable and i'm sure outside of sleazy Chinese data stealing, TikTok is as well.

But so was facebook for quite a long time. Now it's a 500B+ company. I remember when people said Google was crazy for paying $1B for Youtube - now it looks like one of their smartest acquisitions besides DoubleClick.

I won't say so. SV is willing to kill anything that threatens it by acquisition. If TikTok was a US company, SV would have made a nice offer. VCs would have pressed and possibly faced the founders to sell talking about how there's no more room for new players in the social network space. They will point to Snap & Google+ as an example. Then point how instagram was snap for taking the $1Billion. Google, Facebook, Apple all have enough data to see how fast an app is growing and buy/kill it before it becomes too popular.

I think we can still see innovation out of SV, but it will take someone with restraint, and who's not willing to sell out for cash. For a first time founder that's very hard.

You are crazily generalizing off of one event. Sure, this could have been a sv company product. Let's see 10 more things that sv fails with and chinese companies succeed in, then I'll believe it.

I met a Punjabi gentleman in his 50s watching Tik Tok. Turns out there's a vibrant comedy scene in the Punjabi language on Tik Tok. It is huge in the South Asian community and is attracts a large variety of eyeballs.

Can confirm. Source: am Punjabi; wonderful stuff, pretty much the only social media I consume.

... and making these "celebrities" kowtow to Chinese censors.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/26/20883993/tiktok-censorshi...

Or kowtow to American censors [1][2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/9jjpph/re...

TikTok is definitely ushering in the next wave of social. Admittedly I'm old and therefore I am not on it, but I still find a lot of the videos that get re-posted pretty consumable and entertaining.

I wonder how sustainable an app that mostly targets preteens and high schoolers is, though. I realize everyone thinks of the next wave of consumers but will they continue using TikTok? It sounds like a big part of the appeal is that each next wave wants something other than what that the older boring people are using.

In short, very sustainable[1]. Look at Snap. Growing pains, sure, but it's undeniable that it became a social media staple.

[1] Not TikTok though, see my other comment.

TikTok has been aggressively advertising on Snap and Insta for years now. It's very obviously a non-sustainable business model. The whole point of viral growth is that you don't need advertising. I'm sure there's going to be a massively profitable "MySpace for gen-Z or Vine 2.0" coming out soon (does anyone want to build it?), but TikTok ain't it.

Maybe unsustainable in the traditional sense, but if they can negotiate contracts with the talent on their platform, that may be a different avenue for profitability.

I mean look at the success of Lil Nas X. Highly successful TikTok talent.

I'd argue that Lil Nas X had success in spite of TikTok, not because of it. His single was amazing -- just fantastic content all around. 180+ million hits on YouTube doesn't lie. He would've blown up regardless of platform.

Music video seems to have a massive increase in view numbers over any other kind of video category. I question how valid the view numbers are! There must be a lot of computers/tv's left on playing music in burger kings or airports.

How is it non-sustainable, it's booting up. It's not like they keep paying for every time their users use it. It's already viral, folks are now talking about it. I keep seeing TikTok videos on twitter posted/retweeted by users not ads. Hell, I installed it and I never did install Snapchat.

I realized many of my comments are relevant, recent New Yorker articles. So, to stay consistent:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok-hol...

TikTok is fun because it is not political (yet).

The few political TikToks I have seen get destroyed in the comments.

TikTok banned political advertising[1]! Definitely the right move given their targeted audience and shows the company's focus on keeping in that way.

1) https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/03/tiktok-explains-its-ban-on...

Wow that’s very interesting. Thank you for linking that.

Non-sustainable business model or no, it is _the_ thing right now. I found this snippet interesting from the article "When an elderly woman went missing, these four 'junior detectives' sprang into action and saved the day"

"Logan said the group of friends were excited and happy to have found the woman safe.

"We had a party in my tree house eating goldfish and watching TikToks to celebrate," said Makenna."

How much was vox paid for this pr piece, I wonder?

Also I wonder how much bloomberg is paid for posting news related videos using tiktok.

It is a new type of marketing I guess.

Will Smith and Arnold Schwarzenegger also post regularly on tiktok. I don't think tiktok needs to do any more marketing. There is a craze among teenagers to get on there

Tik Tok is incredible at marketing. We've never seen anything quite at this level. Originally they were posting videos all over Reddit but eventually those submissions got blocked. They also paid a bunch of meme channels on YouTube to start posting Tik Tok compilation videos, which reach millions of views.

I think its a very large company and the app is solid.

I mean facebook is large and their apps/software are solid too.

Do you know anything about the legality of TikTok paying "influencers" to upload copies of user-created content, without TikTok or the influencers paying the users anything (as in the YouTube compilation example)? I would have figured users own the copyright to their content, other than the music in it, and that something like that could be considered copyright infringement if their entire clip is being uploaded and monetized by someone else without any consent or compensation. (TikTok videos are short, so compilations are composed of a large number of full videos, rather than snippets of videos.)

I also believe those YouTubers are often making additional money from the compilation videos with sponsorships and affiliate links, in addition to what TikTok pays them.

Is it just a matter of TikTok hoping most small-time creators will see it as free publicity and/or figuring they probably don't have any legal knowledge or resources, or even awareness their content is being monetized by others? Or have the users signed away all revenue-earning potential due to the music licensing, or something?

If the latter's the case, it seems unfair that random YouTubers can monetize the content a TikTok user created while the user gets nothing from it, and while the user can't even monetize their own content themselves.

I would not be surprised if the ToS permitted their behaviour. "Any content you give us, we can use freely in- and outside the platform" kind of deal is going to go past people easily. I think we would have seen people chasing Tiktok already if this wasn't the case.

TikTok's ToS maintain that they own any content posted to the platform, and this is a standard clause for most social media companies. The TikTok users get exposure, which may or may not be worth it.

Cody Ko ran into this last year, video here (relevant portion starts at 4:40): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDdR8cue4eE

Reminds me of the recent episode of South Park where "journalists" like Vox claim to be for human rights but bend over to get Chinese payouts. Also why does this post say it's 3 hours old when it was posted yesterday?

Reminder that: If you check the AndroidManifest.xml of TikTok app you'll see they are tracking persistent device identifiers coupled with phone #. Then if you uninstall TikTok you'll still have a bunch of their files in shared space that other Chinese apps can pick up were you to install them, presumably so they can track you even if you uninstall the app.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21077216

Putting in so many pictures of Haley proves that popularity sells, whether it's Vox or TikTok.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com