TikTok Is Blowing up the Status Quo
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Last week, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg sounded the alarm. TikTok was successfully taking engagement share away from his most-prized pieces of digital real estate: Facebook and Instagram. What had been theorized about for some time is now being discussed out in the open, and we may see others follow Zuckerberg in sending out SOS signals. Companies ranging from Spotify and Netflix to Roku are likely feeling TikTok pressure to some extent. Management teams just haven’t come to grips with such reality.
TikTok’s “secret sauce” is grabbing a shocking amount of viewer data in order to power a recommendation engine that puts YouTube’s algorithm to shame. Depending on how you interact with a particular 15 or 60-second video clip, subsequent video clips are then tailored to keep you wanting more. It’s not even so much about giving you the same video genre over and over either, which would likely lead to burnout. Instead, there is almost a natural ebb and flow to the video clips that keeps you engaged. TikTok’s video recommendations are so good that users are altering their daily content consumption habits because they have so much trouble moving off platform.
TikTok is blowing up the status quo by altering the entire content consumption space. Time that used to go to Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, gaming, and sleep is flowing to TikTok. Google and Facebook, seeing the risk that TikTok posed to their business, quickly released me-too products, YouTube Shorts and Reels, respectively. Each appears to be doing well based on management disclosure. The problem is, they aren’t slowing TikTok but rather cannibalizing existing attention and engagement that was already on YouTube and Facebook/Instagram.
Getting us to swipe through literally hundreds of 60 second or shorter video clips in one sitting is on one level frightening and another level disheartening. Attention spans are dwindling to the point that a multi-minute video is now considered too long. More worrying, we are seeing short-form video take the worst of social media and then be amplified.
“I saw it on TikTok” has become synonymous with false information and rumors. Thanks to the all-powerful recommendation engines powering short-form video platforms, problematic clips are spread to millions of people even more efficiently and quickly than we are accustomed to on social media.
Some video filters for short clips serve no purpose other than to make people feel bad about themselves.
Imitation art has always been a thing with which we turn to celebrities for ways of imitating them. Today, this has changed to the point of doing whatever some random person did on TikTok simply because it went viral. If a clip of a young person having a mental breakdown in a car while taping themselves goes viral, others feel they need to do something similar, all in an attempt to also go viral.
It’s not that these worrying trends were absent on YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram. Instead, short-form video is social media on steroids.
The larger implications found with TikTok’s growing popularity involve how we consume both music and video. One reason why movie theaters don’t have a future is that the entire movie medium is under threat. The number of people willing to spend more than two hours watching a story unfold is declining. We have precedent for what is happening to long-form video when looking at the music industry. Technology has negatively impacted music as an art form. The move from album sales to downloads of individual songs that could be purchased on a standalone basis transformed the music industry. Most people today would be surprised to hear how a music album consisted of songs arranged in a way as to tell a story. Trying to figure out how to even listen to an album in song order is now a question posted in technical support forums. Music is now being equated to 15-second jingles that make for good TikToks.
Some may say that I am overreacting and simply afraid of the change found with short-form video. A few months back, I published a tweet saying short-form video will not lead to a good place. The product lead for YouTube Shorts responded by saying short-form video is additive to storytelling, specifically storytelling “powered by a collective of creators” around the same concept. I wasn’t convinced.
As for how companies will respond to the status quo being changed, there is reason to think not many will find answers. In a sign of Wall Street facing anxiety as to what may be unfolding in the content space, Netflix and Disney saw their market caps decline by a combined $250 billion from peak share prices. While both companies have since seen rebounds in their share prices, the amount of unknown surrounding business models in the scripted video space hasn’t gone away. Some are questioning just what the end goal may be in all of this. Is Netflix actually that different from Instagram in terms of needing to grab our time and attention to do well? What about Spotify’s bet on podcasting turning out not to be so much about pulling people away from Apple Music but keeping them off of TikTok? These questions begin to scratch the surface of how TikTok has blown up the status quo in terms of conventional wisdom as to where the competitive battle lines are actually drawn. We are moving to the point that the more powerful TikTok becomes, the more likely we are to see content consumption behavior change to boost TikTok (and short-form video in general) further.
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