What actually is TikTok?
This is the new Vine and Instagram in one thing - there's no way to get away from this Chinese-made car. TikTok which is a video sharing application from China that gained popularity from the young generation in 2018. From the tendency of the best application of 2018 which the market side distributing the application picks up, it can also see the popularity of it.
TikTok is an application that creates and posts short videos of 15 seconds according to music. The affinity with music is very high, and songs hit from TikTok and others are also born. As a result, TikTok has partnered with the same name company offering a flat-rate music distribution service "AWA" and added music of 25,000 songs.
Indeed, TikTok has acquired the best application in the "entertainment division" of the application in the domestic "Google Play Best of 2018" conducted by Google on December 7, 2018. Meanwhile, although it has not been elected the best app in the Apple App Store, it is within 20th place in the top ranking of the year. It seems to be showing high popularity worldwide.
Where did TikTok come from?
The company ‘ByteDance’ was founded in 2012 in China and is still engaged in the development of mobile applications. Its main product is the ‘Toutiao’ news aggregator with an audience of 120 million people per day. In October, ‘ByteDance’ was recognized as the most expensive startup.
This is quite a rebellious company. Most startups, as a rule, almost immediately go under the wing of major Chinese holdings like Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba. But ByteDance decided to go against the tide and even takes over developers from large technology companies, offering them wages one and a half times higher than market ones.
The TikTok app itself appeared in 2016 and was called Douyin in China. For 500 days, it overcame major competitors within the country. The audience of the service to the beginning of 2018 amounted to 300 million people. Thanks to this, Douyin has his own local memes like “Karma's a bitch”. But in the Chinese social network it is impossible to post a video where Peppa's pig is mentioned - this character is recognized as a symbol of gangsters! Large advertisers came to TikTok, and the service got money on the world market.
User Base
Bytedance has announced that TikTok’s monthly active user reaches 500 million people worldwide. There are two factors as a reason for rapid growth. One is that self-portrait culture has become a trend of young generation. And the other is that smartphones are at the center of young generation's entertainment. TikTok's video seems to have captured the popularity of successfully getting on the tide, as the mainstream shooting themselves, centring on videos that match the music.
Remember vine and musical.ly?
Musical.ly app appeared in 2014. Initially, it was supposed to be called Cicada and was dedicated to education: experts explain in simple language complex things in the format of a video for five minutes. As you already understood, this idea was abandoned.
Reason: they did not find the experts, it was too difficult to make videos, not all topics can be explained in five minutes, and startup founder Alex Zhu realized that such a thing would not go.
Later, Zhu saw on the street how teenagers make faces to music, take selfies and post it on the social network. This is how the karaoke application musical.ly appeared, where the user can record a 15-second clip under the phonogram and put it into a separate social network. On the day the application was launched, it was already used by 500 people.
Over the next ten months, the application continued to increase its audience, but after the failure of Cicada, where $250,000 were poured in, it was too slow. The solution turned out to be very simple: insert a logo with the address of the site and the name of the application into each video. In just one month in the USA alone, the audience has grown 10 times.
Thanks to tracking the actions of users in musical.ly, the application has new features: duets, answers to questions and much more. Later, the service even had its own star. In addition, traditional music industry has appeared in musical.ly in the face of pop performers Selena Gomez, Megan Trainer, Jason Derulo, Lukas Graham and many others. The service helped the artists to promote their music albums.
Today, the application is already intended not only for recording clips to the phonogram. It's about the social network. People want to stay in musical.ly because it already has a large audience.
And one more interesting fact, Remember the Vine social network? In 2016, it could not stand the competition with Instagram and went out. Against the backdrop of the fall of "vine", Musical.ly was able to earn good money, taking his place.
According to SurveyMonkey Intelligence, in 2016, after the advent of broadcasts, the musical.ly application has become even more Periscope. Analysts wrote that in the US, among users of iOS, 4.6 million "sat" in musical.ly, and in Periscope - 4.3 million. However, the CEO of Twitter called this data false.
The success of musical.ly in the international market could not go past ByteDance. In November 2017, the company made a lot of money on advertising from TikTok and bought musical.ly for $ 1 billion. Initially, ByteDance was going to preserve the independence of musical.ly, but on August 2 all users and application functions came under the control of TikTok.
In the end, both musical.ly and TikTok benefited from the deal. Both applications have a large audience in the USA, Europe and China. Both have large advertisers. They are constantly growing audience. Of course, some had concerns about rebranding, since musical.ly and TikTok still have slightly different priorities, but nevertheless - the application is very active both in the App Store and in Google Play. According to SensorTower, in the third quarter of 2018, TikTok was in fourth place in terms of downloads.
Target Audience
The main audience of TikTok is teenagers from 14 to 21 years old. But it was also found that the authors of the channels are also older.
It is widely believed that the main genre of TikTok is a lip-sync, when people move their lips to the music and dance. This is not entirely true. TikTok inherited a lot from Instagram, but with one important difference: the stances in TikTok do not disappear and continue to give views.
As in other social networks, in TikTok you can subscribe to someone and follow his avenues. Why this has become popular, it is possible to understand: there has never been anything like this before. For young people, this is something new, and for adults, a way to have fun on the weekends.
But nevertheless TikTok has enough haters. Basically, hatred is manifested in misunderstanding: for many, it simply does not fit in the head, as someone may like it; the content is for “degenerates." However, sometime they also looked at selfies as a pile of dung, but this genre of photography became popular.
