TikTok, a video sharing social networking app created in September 2017, didn’t start as we know it today. It was the result of two Chinese social network apps that eventually merged: Musical.ly and Douyin. Musical.Ly was an app where users could create and share a 15 second lip sync video song and Douyin was a short form video app. Douyin became very popular in China after its launch in 2016. In order to enter the international market Douyin bought musical.Ly and created from it TikTok as we know it today.
Musical.ly, launched in 2014, raised 150.4 million in funding and Byte Dance ( Douyin parent company) merged with Musical.Lyfor the price of $800 million
The main pain points that TikTok has been trying ( and being successful at ) to solve are ” How to you get users to engage?” and “How to make an app very easy to use and navigate “
Tiktok business model targets an audience of under 30 year olds ( about 66% of their users as of december 2020).
Its revenues comes from different streams:
- In-feed native ads: ads appears in between videos. They mostly used the CPM ( cost per 1000 views), CPV ( Cost per view) or CPC ( cost per click) methods
- Brand Takeover ads: an ad is played as soon as you open the app.It only happens once a day.
- Hashtag Challenge : Tiktok allows the use of promoted hashtag.
- in app purchase : TikTok sells coins to its users who will gift them to their favorite creators (minus a fee for Tiktok, of course)
Hi Fabrice,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about TikTok. As someone that stays up late on weekend watching tiktok, I had no idea that TikTok sell coins on the users, I knew of the other way they get revenues and that pretty interesting. Overall I enjoyed reading this and you pointed out some information I wasn’t clear about.
Also nice website!
Hello Fabrice,
It’s really interesting how Tiktok didn’t start off as Tiktok itself, but rather it started off as two different apps that eventually merged together which is now known as Tiktok! Who would have thought this app would blow up so quick? But I think it is because every video is 30 seconds to a minute long that makes the app so addictive, especially for people with short attention span. Overall, great work Fabrice!
Yes it is very interesting. It was a lot of thinking behind.
yup, I think the question you said TikTok is focusing on is spot on, I personally use TikTok
but before I definitely saw their effort in trying to make people use their app.
Hey Fabrice! I agree that Tiktok is solving the problem of engagement within the app. The integrated features such as duets, using audios to create trends, stitching and filters have all contributed to the natural ease of engagement and collaboration. This engagement has led to the simplest videos becoming the biggest trends like the guy skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac drinking cranberry juice ???? Everyone started using the song to recreate the video and it got so huge that Stevie Nicks herself made her own tiktok at 72, Dreams was back on the billboard charts and he landed a OceanSpray campaign.