The INSANE Truth About TikTok

the world was collapsing around him zhang yi ming was the ceo of by dance the chinese company that owns tick tock and as he watched the news his heart was racing now president donald trump threatened to ban it all together we're looking at tick-tock we may be banning tick-tock tick-tock had already been banned in india losing them 200 million users overnight tick tock was at the center of an international feud with users and governments all around the world asking the same question can we trust tick tock zhang was simultaneously being called a spy by the americans and a traitor by the chinese and other accusations were flying around from all directions tiktok is a data collection service thinly veiled as a social network it's secretly loaded with surveillance software for the chinese government the most addictive social media app of all time they're discriminating against the disabled it's essentially malware that's targeting children tick-tock is a magnet for predators wait take a breath zhang switched off the news and reminded himself that despite all of the negative media attention that tiktok was getting business was going incredibly well if you added up the combined revenue of twitter zoom dropbox lyft snapchat shopify airbnb stripe groupon and spotify all together it still wouldn't be as high as the revenue of bite dance the company's biggest product by far is tick tock which in less than four years has passed 3 billion global downloads but by dance are now working on several other apps that perhaps have even bigger potential they already make more money than netflix have around double the employees of facebook and are expanding worldwide and unprecedented speed and yet how much do you really know about bite dance sure you've seen tiktok promoted everywhere and possibly use it yourself but did you ever stop to think how this simple chinese video app suddenly took over the world you see if you're like me and her dismissed tick tock it's just a cringy app for kids lip syncing and dancing you're wrong in less than a decade bite dance have gone from a four-bedroom apartment in china where the electricity kept cutting out to becoming a global empire that is shaping not just social media but technology politics and much much more the inside story of how it happened is incredibly inspiring and fascinating but make no mistake america's tech giants are terrified of by dance and the real question is should you be terrified too [Music] bite dance is an app factory whilst tiktok is by far their most successful app when the company launched in 2012 they created 12 different apps within just a few months these included titles such as laugh so much you'll get pregnant and real beauties every day a hundred beautiful girls at this point it was hard to imagine the colossal impact bite dance was going to have on the world in fact they were even struggling to hire people because of the low brow reputation they developed early on the company's founder zhang yi ming always had big plans he was inspired by business magnates like steve jobs and had a dream of one day building a global company that was as borderless as google this was an even more ambitious goal than it sounds because china essentially operates a separate internet to the rest of the world big platforms we all know like youtube and facebook are banned in china and likewise internet companies that start in china almost never manage to take their services worldwide so zhang knew that to defy the odds and build a global empire white dance needed to think bigger with the apps they were creating then one day in 2012 he had an epiphany while sat on a train he noticed a decline in people reading newspapers and the sharp increase in phone usage and deduced that we would soon get all our information from phones but most importantly he also realized that getting information from our phones meant we didn't have to rely on people to select the information for us through a combination of ai big data and machine learning it would be possible to personalize the information to each individual and show them the content they personally are most interested in and thus bike dance's next app was born totiel which translates as headlines a news app with a powerful recommendation algorithm that provided a feed of news stories tailored to each user zhang said we want to become the information platform that understands you best uber matches people to cars rematch people to information the idea was simple but at the time quite revolutionary by tracking every single tap pause and swipe by dance's algorithm was quickly able to understand users better than they understood themselves instead of just getting a random list of articles curated by someone else the algorithm would be able to figure out exactly which news stories users would be most interested in and give them a unique personalized feed and the more they use the app the more the algorithm learned about them so the more accurate its recommendations became as a result it was very addicting and a huge success so much so that other companies soon started copying the idea and bite dance knew they needed to keep innovating or else a rival with a bigger budget would beat them luckily zhang and had another epiphany and this one wasn't just going to change the company it was going to change the world [Music] it's reported that the average user of headlines the news app by dance created spends 74 minutes per day on the app is this because people were suddenly more interested in news of course not it's because if you design an incredibly smart algorithm that learns what people like and keeps giving them more of it it's gonna get people hooked but zhang had realized why stop at news and information so they took the same addictive algorithm from their headlines app and created a new app for short videos now you're probably thinking this new video app was tick tock and you're half right in 2017 they launched the international version of tick tock we all know and we'll get to that very soon but in 2016 bike dance launched dojin which is the chinese version of tiktok same premise same logo same interface but china has its own segregated version which came first and there's a few notable differences firstly it had a section called positive energy with selected videos that promote the chinese government secondly it had advanced facial recognition where you can search for videos by tapping a face a feature which led to lawsuits when bike dance considered introducing it on tiktok the chinese version also makes people's skin appear lighter by default in line with china's whitening obsession in short the chinese version of tiktok is the same app with some major cultural differences but one thing is very much the same on both versions the powerful algorithm it's unique because it isn't built around your social network you don't have to friend follow subscribe or even search for anything you just open the app start swiping and the algorithm will get better and better at understanding which videos to show you and because you consume so many short videos in just a few minutes it gives the algorithm so much data about what content you do and don't like you could watch a hundred videos in a single session as opposed to something like youtube where you may only watch a small handful and since you're not reliant on your social circle for content you'll never run out of interesting videos to watch you're just one flick away from something totally random and new psychologists have found parallels between this and the effect of playing a slot machine in a casino so when you combine that with the neverending scroll effect which tricks our brains into not knowing when to stop using the app it's easy to see why people get sucked in bite dance even added a feature where when you press the back button it shows you a new video you have to double tap the button to actually get out of the app i'm addicted to tic tac now i've just downloaded it myself and i can't take my eyes off the videos i spent between seven to eight hours you just keep on scrolling like you just lose track of time whilst you're on there you open this app you start swiping and before you know it three hours of your life is gone and you've achieved basically nothing now we're gonna look back at the effects of what that does to the brain what effect does that have on the rest of your life [Music] however was bright dance had no problem getting people to watch their new video app they knew that an addictive algorithm was useless if they didn't have enough people creating videos as well unless they launched a genius five-part plan to get creators on board step one lower the barrier to entry competition on social media had become tough filming simple selfie videos was no longer enough to blow up on youtube you needed to learn how to use editing software create thumbnails and countless other things which made it difficult for young new creators to get started so bite dance made posting videos ridiculously easy with built-in editing functions in the app you could even apply filters and add music to make the video immediately seem way more professional and interesting then step 2 challenges if you remember the viral ice bucket challenge in 2014 well so did bite dance they realized that if they created challenges within the app that were easy for people to replicate like a certain dance and then people didn't even have to think about original creative content they could join in by just doing the challenge which then leads to step three give them a taste of fame if you look on any social media forums you'll find plenty of people complaining about how hard it is to beat the algorithm with youtube facebook and instagram and in stark contrast you'll find plenty of people raving about how easily their tick-tock videos blew up i literally gained like a million followers in about the space of like six weeks basically a bite dance realized that by sharing the love around a lot of creators they'd attract way more people wanting to make videos for the app it was like a new gold rush for everyone who had gotten late on other social media you could join tick tock and on your first video rack up millions of views and by giving creators a dose of fame and a hit of dopamine it encouraged them to recruit more people to the app by telling their audience to come and follow them on tech talk if you follow gary vee you'll probably be very familiar with but then this dance started to notice a bit of a problem making the barrier of entry so low meant they got an equally low quality of content they had plenty of people posting videos but a lot of it was just kids lip-syncing or dancing to songs so then came step four of the plan bribe the top talent white dance messaged creative influencers with big followings on other platforms and offered to pay them to come and post on their app they also reportedly went to art schools to find good-looking creative students and promised to make them famous once they'd attracted some higher quality content they manipulated the algorithm to make sure it got a lot of views to try and improve people's perceptions of how good the content on the app was and then finally step five nurture relationships they assigned the top creators account managers who would sometimes even help them with school assignments and relationship issues to make sure the users were able to create lots of content and thus bite dance had done it using this strategy in china dojin went viral of course plenty of other chinese companies had tried to copy them but remember the more you use by dance's apps the more the algorithm learns about you which means you get served even better content recommendations which means you use the app more and this creates a never-ending cycle of improvements as a result very few people wanted to switch to any of these competitor apps that popped up by dance had cracked the code in china and now they wanted to replicate this success worldwide in 2017 they officially launched their international version of the app tick tock and whilst zhang yi ming had always been a very ambitious man even he couldn't have predicted the insanity that was about to begin [Music] quick quiz for you you're a company with an app that's incredibly popular in china but now you want to compete worldwide against the biggest tech giants you a post lots of the top employees from rivals like facebook and youtube by offering them higher wages b pay top influencers from facebook and youtube to come and post on tick tock instead or c pour billions of dollars into running ads on facebook and youtube so you can literally siphon off users from your competitors trick question white dance did all three you see a tick tock success should never have been able to happen the current kings of user generated content could have stopped her but they underestimated tick-tock and didn't realize they were a serious competitor until it was too late by which point tic-toc had stolen many of their employees creators and viewers of course the reason everyone underestimated them is because tick tock's growth rate is unprecedented they went from nowhere to everywhere insanely quickly so how did they do it now when bite dance launched the chinese version of tiktok they used a few slightly questionable promotion techniques for example they'd made deals with phone shops to unbox the devices reinstall their app and then reseal the box so the app was already there when users switched on their new phone however with the international version of tick tock one of their first genius marketing tricks was right out in the open for everyone to see they initially encouraged users to share their tick tock videos on other social media which sounds strange at first why would tick tock want to make it easy for people to repost take talks on instagram youtube snapchat and so on simple because every tick tock video contains a watermark in the corner promoting their app i'm willing to bet that even if you've never downloaded tick tock in your life you've seen a video with the tick tock watermark it's the ultimate free publicity and remember tick tock had made it so much easier to create content thanks to the in-app editing functions so people will create videos on tik-tok then go and post them on all their other social media giving tick tock endless free marketing the fight dance team would even make fake accounts on other social media themselves and just repost lots of the best tik tok videos because they knew that if you see that tick tock water mark enough eventually you'll go and download the app yourself but as well as free promotion the tick tock team did plenty of paid ads too now to create an ad campaign most companies hire expensive consultants recording studios editors actors designers etc but bike dance just used videos people had uploaded to tick tock as ads their terms and conditions gave them permission to do that then all that money they saved on not making ads meant they had more money to invest in actually running ads across all major platforms they initially targeted highly populated cities with low cpms like some of the poorest cities in india this got them a lot of downloads quickly and cheaply which shot the app to the top of the app store thus attracting lots of free publicity once ticktock had some momentum they targeted micro influencers with 5 to 10k followers on other social media and promised to make them stars on tick tock if they started posting content on the app many of these influencers were frustrated by the slow growth on other social media so they gladly made the switch to tick-tock then tick-tock stepped it up they began targeting big influencers like those with 1 million followers and above by offering them big cash payments to come and post on tick-tock according to the wall street journal baiden's even paid one million dollars to get one unnamed influencer to post a video on tick tock whilst it may seem ridiculous having celebrities using the platform attracted lots of new users and advertisers not just that but it brought in investors just about every venture capital firm was looking to find the next facebook and seeing different stars joining the platform led to some investors plowing billions of dollars into tick tock which bike dance reinvested into even more advertising at one point they were spending three million dollars per day on ads the focus was just pure growth not profit but one of the biggest keys to success was that bite dance made many acquisitions of other companies that helped fuel ticktock's growth many of these were ai companies that could help improve their algorithm even further but also whenever tick tock expanded into a new area they tried to acquire a local company who had good knowledge and experience of the city however bite dance's most influential acquisition of all was musically a short video app that was very similar to tic toc especially with its emphasis on using songs and videos the app was struggling a little bit but it did have a solid user base in the us especially amongst very young users so buying this was a cost-effective way for bike dance to get new users from a new market bike hands later merged musically and ticked up together which a lot of musically users weren't happy with at first but they soon got on board when they realized the tick tock algorithm was better now whilst all of this might seem too easy you have to remember bite dan's already had a formula to follow from all their experiences with the chinese version of the app for example they knew how important it was to make the barrier of entry so low for creators so they had a whole team creating beautifying filters to make people look better so they didn't feel self-conscious about posting videos t-talk also copied many of the popular challenges over from the chinese version so that there were lots of easy but fun challenges for people to participate in when they downloaded tiktok and then one day something surprising happened it was early morning in the bike dance headquarters the marketing team were feeling tired it had been an exhausting few months and bike dance have the same 996 working culture as many other chinese tech companies which means you work 9am to 9pm 6 days a week you get paid very well with lots of bonuses available but it's intense to say the least so everyone was a little surprised when early one morning someone excitedly shouted arnold schwarzenegger just joined tick-tock it was big news because arnold wasn't getting paid or asked to do it he just heard about the app and posted some videos for fun this generated free publicity for tick-tock and proved to them they were reaching a tipping point they were no longer having to pay stars to join tick-tock was becoming the place to be with even celebrities now voluntarily joining the app but despite all of this marketing we've just talked about perhaps the biggest reason for tick-tock sudden growth was something completely out of their control [Music] [Applause] [Music] locked at home with not much else to do tick tock became the go-to app kids even got their parents using it and doing challenges together tick tock's growth had already been explosive but the pandemic just added fuel to the fire it's reported that during lockdowns the average tick tock user opened the app eight different times every day suddenly tick tock was on a faster growth trajectory than youtube and bright dancers international expansion had gone unimaginably well but here's the thing during tick tock's rapid global expansion multiple issues had been bubbling under the surface and in the blink of an eye all of their hard work was about to come crashing down [Music] [Music] in 2019 india banned tick-tock due to claims of spreading explicit content overnight tiktok lost around 200 million users pakistan soon banned them too tik tok would eventually manage to appeal the decision only for them to get banned again just a few months later on the grounds that they were stealing and surreptitiously transmitting uses data outside of the country but this was just the start of a domino effect when more and more governments around the world started raising concerns about tick tock specifically what data is tic toc actually collecting and what is it doing with that data everyone had their own theories on this a popular reddit post claimed to have reverse engineered the app and stated it was essentially a data collection service that's thinly veiled as a social network an ios update also meant that users would be alerted when an app accesses their clipboard soon videos emerged of tiktok reading almost every bit of info that was copied on someone's device even if they weren't using the app the us secretary of state claimed tiktok was among a number of chinese apps feeding data directly to the chinese communist party the us government then opened a national security review of the platform after both a democrat and republican lawmaker suggested it posed a serious risk and that it could be surveillance software for the chinese governments a senator also described it as a trojan horse whilst the financial times reported that white dans were trying to circumvent apple's privacy policies the android version includes code that allows for the downloading of remote zip files unzips them and executes the apps inside arbitrarily ticktock asks for access to your videos your photos your microphone your camera and your contacts tick-tock also collects information about the messages that you send about the apps that you use the other apps on your phone it collects the sites that you visit it collects your search history it collects your keystrokes it collects your location data wait wait wait hold on collecting obscene amounts of data is unfortunately a pretty common practice especially by social media platforms so why was everyone freaking out well china's national intelligence law requires all companies within its borders to hand over data at its request without the need for a warrant in fact the government can literally take ownership of your company if they choose to so yes most people have accepted big tech have loads of our data but the idea of the chinese government having all of our personal data seemed more worrying especially given how much data tick tock collects every bit in byte of data that tick tock collects is under the scope of china's intelligence law maybe that's why it's getting banned from the us armed services and why reddit's ceo recently claimed that it was fundamentally parasitic but again let's hold up this is one side of the story here's the other side of the story tigtok have repeatedly stated that they are not a chinese company yes by dance the parent companies but they created a whole separate app and company for tick-tock that's not based in china and thus not under their rules tik-tok state they have never given data to the chinese government and never will it could also be argued that everything going on with countries banning and threatening tick tock wasn't really about tick tock this was about the rise of china tick tock was unfairly caught in the middle of a political battle between several governments and it was just being used as a pawn in a game of geopolitical chess sure tick tock collects a lot of data but that's because their whole app is built around understanding you better to show you more tailored videos not because they're surveillance for the chinese many of the accusations against them were just theoretical fears rather than actual evidence but despite that it seemed that in some western countries tic toc was becoming public enemy number one especially in the us where trump ran ads saying tick tock is spying on you and then the u.s will ban these apps within 45 days unless they are taken over by an american company of course we know that microsoft is currently in talks to buy some of tick tocks operations in countries like the us canada australia and new zealand in this executive order trump cited some of the things we already know that u.s officials are worried about when it comes to these apps things like national security concerns how they collect data tiktok were told they had to find a us buyer or else they'd be shut down many tick tock stars who'd built a career for themselves using the platform were panicked but soon it looked like microsoft was gonna swoop in and buy the american branch of tick tock so that the app could continue right at the last minute though trump suggested he wouldn't sign off on it unless a lot of money went to the u.s treasury so the deal fell apart next it looked like oracle was about to buy tick tock a deal was agreed and then again right at the last minute trump announced white dance would be creating a five billion dollar education fund as part of the deal which by dance was completely unaware of so once again the deal fell through meanwhile bite dance and tick tock were suing trump and the u.s government in a hope to delay the ban until after the 2020 u.s election and when joe biden took over as president tick tock thought all of their problems were about to fade away but instead biden signed an executive order for deeper investigations so whilst there was no immediate ban the threat still very much looms over tick tock the irony of all of this though is that whilst many in the west were calling bite dance a puppet for the chinese government the chinese government were acting just as viciously towards bite dance themselves china completely banned one of bite dance's other apps that was meant for jokes and memes because they claimed it had vulgar content white dance really was facing attacks from all directions but what's most interesting of all is that whilst the entire world was busy debating tick tock's data policies they were completely missing something much more sinister [Music] okay has anyone else noticed that your for you page has been a little too accurate lately it hasn't been things that i'll google or i talk about it's been thought an algorithm designed to give people more of what they want sounds great in theory until you really stop to think about it for example what happens when a paedophile joins the app and what they want to see is underage girls dancing provocatively if you're looking at a lot of kids dancing sexually it's going to give you more kids dancing sexually here's a video showing a young girl in class on the floor in her school uniform it's attracted hundreds of comments mainly for much older men a lot of the accounts he follows were mostly young girls i saw that there was one as young as seven there now it's worth acknowledging tick tock are not alone in these issues youtube had a predator scandal of its own due to its recommendation algorithm where old men would be watching clips of young children on youtube so the algorithm recommends them more of that content worse still they would link each other to certain videos and time stamps in the comments which led to youtube having to disable all comments on kids videos but with tick tock the problems were exacerbated further by the fact you can privately message users plus the fact that around one in four users of tiktok are believed to be under 17. on a related note tiktok have already paid millions of dollars to authorities for knowingly collecting private info about children without parental consent they also had to pay out many more millions when some data got leaked including private details about children as young as six years old tic toc's predator problem is merely one example of how their powerful algorithm can send people often young kids down incredibly dark rabbit holes a second example is how easily kids can be exposed to disturbing videos for example this reporter set up a brand new tick tock account pretending to be a 13 year old she didn't like or follow anything and yet before long the app showed me this clip of a confrontation in the street i lingered on the video but didn't press like before long i was being fed a stream of videos of people screaming profanities a violent assault and a young man lying bloodied in the street and tick-tock thinks i'm thirty a third example of a dangerous rabbit hole is depressive content if the algorithm realizes that what you engage with most is sad videos your feed will become increasingly dark and depressing in fact one report found that within just half an hour 93 of videos you get shown will be depression related if those are the type of videos you engage with most in tick-tock's defense the algorithm is simply trying to give the user the content it engages with the most that keeps them on the platform the longest it's not deliberately doing anything bad but if you're already depressed you probably would linger on the sad videos which means you'll get sadder and sadder content your feed will be filled with the bleakest and darkest corners of tiktok a lot of which is totally unmoderated including videos encouraging suicide even within popular viral tick tocks there have been multiple challenges promoting something dangerous stupid tick tock benadryl overdose challenge somebody's died from this already another example is the promotion of completely unsafe products one girl who struggled with an eating disorder found that her feed was filled with videos advertising unregulated weight loss pills and harmful crash diets when she made a video calling tiktok out for allowing this content her post got deleted because i said this app is promoting eating disorders which brings us to yet another issue some people have with tick tock censorship moderators on tick tock were told to restrict or shadow ban videos from users who appeared ugly poor or disabled for example their moderation guidelines said to restrict content from people who were chubby having down syndrome or simply posting in a poor or dilapidated location a spokesperson later said this was to try and prevent cyberbullying although others have argued that tic-tac was simply trying to get content on their platform they felt was more desirable the people behind the algorithm have godlike powers when it comes to controlling what tick-tock's billions of users actually get to see another example of tick-tock controlling the type of content on its platform came when the guardian uncovered that tick-tock was restricting content relating to the independence of tibet and taiwan along with subjects like the tiananmen square protests in other words tick tock census videos that they know won't please the chinese government some say this is to try and advance china's foreign policy aims but the most likely reality is white dance simply don't want to annoy the chinese government any further after they already banned one of their popular apps the truth is take up can't really win here some think tik tok is stifling free speech especially since they announced plans to hire thousands more employees to their censorship and moderation teams but on the other side other people feel tick-tock is not doing enough to control what gets posted and that they have a big problem with misinformation because tick-tock videos can easily go viral there's also the risk that users will wittingly or unwittingly share information that's false and once it spreads it can be really difficult to stop some people are also concerned how much hate speech goes undetected on tick tock sometimes if you're reading the hate comments and the stress load it can be so much for your body and you're just overwhelmed and you're lonely so that can also creep into depression just to emphasize how extreme this issue is there's now a masked vigilante who is trying to track down bullies on tick tock because the tick tock moderation team have struggled to keep up with all the abuse now again let's be clear many of these problems are incredibly difficult for tick tock to deal with and they certainly do seem to be trying and it should also be acknowledged that the vast majority of users don't have problems like this but that's the most worrying part because everyone's feed is so different many people don't even know about the darker corners of tick tock a parent using the app will see a wildly different feed to what their kids may see a person who's happy will see a wildly different feed to what a depressed person would see to summarize the tic toc algorithm really is incredible at giving you content that will keep you watching longer no matter how dark or disturbing that content is however despite all of these issues predators dark rabbit holes dangerous challenges censorship bullying and plenty of other problems tick tock has become the world's hottest platform and from a business perspective it's a clear success story and now one of the world's largest private companies so to understand how bike dance achieved that so quickly despite all of these issues there's one final piece of the puzzle we need to talk about that's perhaps the most crucial piece [Music] an app that only allowed videos up to six seconds long was created in 2012 the same year that bite dance started vine got acquired by twitter before it even officially launched and when the app went live in 2013 they rapidly built up an active user base considering this was several years before bike dance would create tick tock vine looked perfectly positioned to dominate the short video markets but by 2015 vine had a big problem all their top creators were becoming increasingly frustrated since vine offered no way to monetize their content the top graders felt they'd helped make finer success and the vine team was basically ignoring them so the creators started posting vines to direct people to their other social media instead concerned the vine team agreed to a meeting with 18 of the top creators and heard their demands the creators wanted to be paid 1.2 million dollars a year to post three vines a week internally the twitter team were very worried about this idea they figured if they started dishing out money to content creators on vine it would set a precedent and people would start wanting money for tweets as well but they knew losing all of their biggest content creators would look terrible so they were considering it until they realized that the top vine stars didn't want 1.2 million dollars to split between them they wanted 1.2 million dollars each and considering vine was making a loss at this point it just wasn't possible so the top stars at the platform left vine continued to struggle for money and by 2017 the app was officially dead ironically this was the year tick tock launched you see bike dance had been observing carefully and vine's brief moment in the sun had proven the demand for short videos but also highlighted two important lessons number one don't ignore your best creators find a sustainable way to pay them and number two don't let them get too powerful now there are many reasons for tick-tock success the vast amounts of money it spent it's powerful algorithm fortunate timing good management clear strategy a fair bit of luck and many more but one of the biggest factors of all was that tiktok truly focused on creators right from day one at the beginning they'd even invite users to the bike dance offices to chat get feedback and create videos together bike dance had learnt a lot of lessons from vine but the biggest of all was about building a creator economy within its app a whole ecosystem where new creators had a real shot at going viral and the top creators had a way to profit so they'd stay loyal and in order to do that tick tock figured out a way to do the one thing i never could make a hell of a lot of money [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] eventually the big tech giants realized tick-tock posed a serious threat to them which is why just about every social media app launched a service that was essentially a tick tock clone instagram launched reels facebook launched lasso snapchat launch spotlight youtube launched shorts and so on in fact instagram even announced they're no longer a photo sharing app with many articles pointing out they're trying to become tick-tock but it was too little too late by that point tick-tock was a billion-dollar app firstly tic toc obviously monetized with ads in the video feed but because the videos were longer than vines it was much easier to attract advertisers especially because the ads look very similar to normal videos there's just a tiny yellow ad sticker in the corner so this means brands can make their ads look like user generated content and get much higher engagement as often people don't even realize they're watching an ad tick tock can also charge higher amounts to advertisers because they have so much data about what each person likes so the ads can be very targeted secondly tiktok created a built-in creator marketplace connecting businesses and creators together so they could make brand deals and this was the ultimate win win win for creators it gave them an easy and direct way to make money within the app for advertisers it allowed them to easily find relevant creators for their brand view their profile stats and make a secure payment without risk of getting scammed and finally for tick-tock it not only made their app more appealing but also meant they could keep tabs on exactly what deals were being made and take a share of the revenue for themselves thirdly tick tock monetized with sponsored brand challenges for example samsung worked with tiktok to create the video snap challenge where you take three different pictures and it merges them into a single image the catch is this feature is only available on samsung galaxy s21 phones so basically tick-tock have found ways to blur the lines between what's content and what's an advertisement which means they can charge brands a lot more money but interestingly if we look at the chinese version of tick tock we can see that bike dance have plenty more monetization tricks up their sleeve that they soon might be bringing over to tick tock for example tipping via live streams is a much more common thing there there's also a feature where any user can pay to boost their post visibility to a certain audience but most notably of all is how bike dance is planning on disrupting ecommerce yep bite dancer is not just taking on social media giants now they're taking on amazon here's how it works let's say you're browsing tick tock and you see a video with some cherries in it and they look delicious well tick tock will show you a pop-up with a button to buy cherries your payment card and address will already be registered so you won't even need to leave the app to buy them of course this shopping feature can work with anything since tic tocs ai can tell exactly what's being shown in a video and show you a related item that you can buy essentially they want to blur the lines between content and shopping and it's easy to see how this can lead to a lot of impulse purchases since you won't need to go actively looking for things to buy the chinese version of tiktok reported they had nearly 30 million dollars worth of sales using this feature on a single day in december 2018 the feature is very popular in china already and will likely become much more widely used on tick tock as well especially because by dance have already entered into partnerships with big companies like walmart and l'oreal but it goes further they're even experimenting with features like food delivery with me app proving there is endless potential ways to monetize the billions of users tick tock now has and thus bike dance's focus on building a lucrative business rather than just a popular app it's what separates it from vine and many other short form video apps that were similar but never made it so whilst many people seem to think of tick tock as just another vine a fad that will come and go tic toc is already far more successful than vine could have ever even dreamed of in fact i would like to put forward to you an entirely different opinion this is just the beginning of tick tock and i'd like to tell you a short story to prove it before we get to the final chapter of the tick tock story which is honestly the most important of all i have two things to share with you firstly congratulations on making it this far in the video in this current tick-tock era our attention spans seem to be an all-time low so watching 40 minutes of a single video is rare but if you're like me and you enjoy more in-depth longer form stories like this feel free to turn on notifications for this channel as i'll be posting more mini movies like this very soon secondly i know from the comments many of you are interested in making youtube your full-time income but i also know that starting with youtube can be incredibly difficult and overwhelming so that's why i created the youtube business blueprint which gives you my exact strategies for making content like this rapidly growing your channel setting up multiple revenue streams and if you want scaling it like a business so you can have a team working for you it's basically an all-in-one system with everything you need and everything i wish i'd had much earlier so if you want to get paid to make videos on whatever topics you find interesting check out the first link in the description because for a limited time if you buy the course you'll also get a free one-hour strategy call with me so we can work on your channel or business together so pause the video now and check out the link below then let's get back to the story [Music] in 2018 montero hill was unemployed had no money and was sleeping on the floor of his sister's house he dropped out of college to pursue his dream of becoming a famous rap artist and it was going terribly nothing was working nobody knew him and he didn't have a record label so it was recording songs out of his nan's closets up until one day where a small influencer used one of his songs in a tik-tok video that song was old town road montero better known as lilna's x suddenly had his life completely changed old town road went viral on tick tock with people dressing up as cowboys to fit the theme of the song old town road then went on to become one of the most successful songs of all time and it was all thanks to tiktok in fact tech talk has had a real impact on the entire music industry it's a new way for artists to get their music heard record companies are even paying influencers to use their songs in tik tok videos and tick tock themselves offer an expensive service where they will craft a challenge around a specific song to help to get more people to hear it dojo cat is just one example of an artist whose success was masterminded by tick tock because of all the data tick tock have they've also been advising record companies which songs of an album should be released as singles because they can see which songs users are saving most often but this goes even further some artists are now even writing songs with tiktok in mind thinking about how the lyrics or music could be turned into some kind of tick-tock challenge or meme now let's zoom out for a second this story about the music industry highlights two things number one tick-tock provides an opportunity for content creators of all kinds to get more visibility than they normally would on other platforms in fact there's countless jobs and careers tiktok is helping and many lives it's transforming not to mention the billions of active users who are entertained by tick tock every day so whilst it's easy for us to look at the dark side of tick tock there are also countless people who have been very positively impacted by the app you can post one video and instantly overnight be viral it's given an insane and kind of unexpected opportunity to a lot of young people to kind of express their opinions but the second thing this music example reveals is that white dance have much bigger plans than just being a content platform they want to disrupt everything short videos is just the stars the obvious next step is long-form video which is why the chinese version of tik-tok is allowing videos up to 15 minutes long but by dents have a totally separate app called watermelon specifically designed for longer contents that should not only have youtube worried but also streaming giants like netflix pythons have already made licensing deals with the bbc pbs and many more they even hired the x head of disney plus but by dance's plans are much bigger than video bite dance have been very vocal about entering the gaming market and have bought multiple game publishing companies already at one point three of the top five mobile games in china were from bite dance they also recently announced plans to hire over 10 000 new employees for some new education related apps they're even entering financial technology cloud hosting and search white dance also already have a business software called log which combines email chat video calls calendars and cloud document storage they also quietly launched a new division called white dance plus which sells ai to other businesses in china fight ants are also doubling down on their messaging apps and have started putting huge ads for their apps all over the chinese version of tiktok you can certainly expect that at some point bite dance will start directing tick tock users to some of their many other apps and services because whilst tick tock was their first big international hit it's just the beginning it's a tool that will help them build their empire most people have never even heard of by dance and just think of tik-tok as some silly short video app but let's be clear bike dance already have over 110 000 employees in over 200 cities around the world and are expanding rapidly into more industries than anyone can keep track of truthfully it's impossible to know for sure exactly where bike dance is heading and how powerful they're going to become but one thing is clear zhangyi ming's dream of building a company as borderless as google has become a reality now if you thought the story of tick tock and bite dance was interesting wait until you hear the story of whatsapp in this mini movie we finally answer the question how does whatsapp really make money just click here to check it out now thanks for watching magnate's media i've been john you've been awesome i'll see you in the next episode cheers [Music]

Channel: MagnatesMedia

Views: 2,491,369

Keywords: The story of tiktok, the insane story of tiktok, tiktok movie, how tiktok started, how tiktok became so popular, how tiktok become so popular, magnatesmedia, magnate media, magnatemedia, business stories, zhang yiming, rise of tiktok, dark side of tiktok, is tiktok safe, is tiktok bad, is tiktok banned, is tiktok dangerous, is tiktok spying on you, tiktok data, tiktok story, bytedance, how bytedance began, the story of bytedance, tiktok bytedance, bytedance tiktok

Id: djk159kLBwA

Length: 49min 36sec (2976 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 09 2021