Regulatory-based pressure is an important issue that TikTok needs to solve urgently.
Editor’s note: This article comes from the WeChat public account “One Entertainment Observation” (ID: yiyuguancha) , author: big home entertainment.
Although the scourge of the new crown virus still has no end in sight, the major companies that provide online entertainment services to home-isolated global users have maintained a rare high efficiency. Quibi, a mobile film and television-level short video platform created by Hollywood veteran Kasenberg, went live as scheduled on April 6th. The first time, due to the influx of a large number of users, even the server crashed.
At the same time, according to reports from The Information a few days ago, YouTube, the world ’s largest video platform, is planning a new feature-focusing on social and short video, and the tentative name “Shorts” from the currently exposed feature is not It’s hard to see that YouTube is clearly beginning to target TikTok (TikTok Overseas Edition), which is currently growing rapidly worldwide.
According to the currently summarized information, YouTube ’s short video service is not a stand-alone product, but will exist as a new feature in YouTube ’s mobile application. The service allows users to link their videos Go to YouTube ’s music library to create music videos similar to TikTok. YouTube plans to release the feature later this year.
While YouTube ’s attempts in the field of PGC (Professional Original Content) in recent years have been unsatisfactory, as a PUGC (Personal Professional Original Content) platform with more than 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, it has attracted users YouTube has a considerable accumulation of original content and advertising distribution models.
However, this is such a targeted goal in the short video field, and it is not just the YouTube giant that is behind it. In the face of TikTok ’s growth rate of more than 125% in the past two years, a number of North American technologies including Facebook The company has already started to sell.
TikTok ’s unprecedented success before going to sea
Since it is not a substantial competitor, even the streaming giant Netflix has recently started to use TikTok came to market. First, a documentary called “Tiger Raising” is a hot topic through viral videos on TikTok. A few days ago, the official Twitter client of Netflix movies directly asked followers to exchange their recommended movie lists with popular TikTok videos. The popularity of TikTok in North America is evident.
▲ “Tiger Raises for Suffering” poster
There has been a lot of reports about byte bounce and the popularity of its various short videos in China in the past few years, but probably no one can believe that this company relies on precision algorithm recommendations and high frequency and low information content three years ago. Content-based companies have been able to successfully open up a situation in the international market with the overseas version of one of its applications, and have even caused many foreign government agencies to be vigilant.
Even if they are huge, such as Tencent and Alibaba, their current flagship products in China, QQ, WeChat, Taobao, Alipay, etc., have few successful precedents accepted by foreign users. The reason for the difference in user experience, on the other hand, in the past, when the domestic Internet products grew wildly, even if there is no overseas market, with the huge domestic market of more than 1 billion users, these products have no incentive to try overseas localization.
In the last ten years since the byte beat was born, the days when you were able to make money lying down can be said to be gone forever, although its reliance on today ’s headlines, vibrato, and watermelon videos can still be popular in China. Two, but when faced with higher levels of competitive pressure, it can be said that looking abroad is an inevitable choice. However, over-emphasizing TikTok ’s current strong state can easily lead to a misunderstanding. It seems that it has set off a storm as soon as it appears in overseas markets. In fact, TikTok ’s success is largely related to a billion-dollar The acquisition is closely related.
TikTok was launched overseas in August 2017. Despite the huge investment in promotion, the response was mediocre. Therefore, in November of that year, ByteDance spent billions of dollars to acquire the music social software Musical that was born in China but popular in North America. .ly, if this acquisition did not happen, no domestic users would have heard of this software, but it was such a mouth-singing app that had more than 240 million users worldwide and was sought after in the North American market.
With the merger with musical.ly to integrate existing accounts and data into one application, TikTok relied on a billion-dollar acquisition and integration to instantly establish itself overseas.
Not all overseas companies have the courage and capital to achieve the first step of going overseas through a large purchase. Therefore, TikTok’s approach may be more suitable for later learners to learn from, that is, to achieve true localization. Compared with WeChat, a social communication tool that emphasizes user experience, TikTok emphasizes operations as a short-video application to spend leisure time. Therefore, it is necessary to achieve a localized operation strategy that truly understands the local cultural environment and user habits.
The landing on the Japanese market is a typical example. As a market with unique Internet culture, the closure of the Japanese Internet culture itself and the conservative habits of Japanese users make it more difficult for new applications to enter this market. Therefore, attracting local Japanese executives to participate in decision-making to meet the needs of local users, and providing more localized content has become the main strategy of TikTok localization.
TikTok reached a partnership with Japanese entertainment giant Avex on the Japanese version of the background music track, opening up the right to use 25,000 tracks for Asian users. In 2018, TikTok created more than 280 official theme challenges in Japan, most of which were the most popular music in Japan at the time.
In promotion, TikTok invited popular Japanese singer Kyary Pamyu Pamyu and girl idol group E-Girls to enter the endorsement. In a recent variety show in Japan, there was a paragraph where the Japanese influencer showed the guest how to use TikTok. It can appear in mainstream Japanese TV programs, and it can be seen how popular it is.
▲ TikTok cooperates with Kyary Pamyu Pamyu MV screenshot
In the United States, with the acquisition of musical.ly, TikTok became a hit, and the original accumulation of millions of daily active users was achieved through the merger.
At the same time, in terms of localization in North America, TikTok has almost used a strategy similar to Japan. Through cooperation, many celebrities and celebrities have been invited to the TikTok platform, and the accumulated music copyright music library has driven more originals. user. In October 2018, TikTok became the most downloaded and installed app in the United States, with approximately 80 million downloads in the United States and nearly 800 million downloads worldwide.
In addition to siege in developed countries such as Japan and the United States, TikTok is more successful in occupying the Indian and Brazilian markets that are also developing countries with China. According to statistics from Sensor Tower, as of February this year, India is still TikTok The market with the largest volume accounts for 41.3%; followed by Brazil with 8.6%. It is precisely this comprehensive attack that has directly triggered the vigilance of foreign technology giants, and a battle of short videos is about to happen.
Competition and regulation, TikTok is enemies in the stomach
The social networking giant Facebook, which has more than 3 billion users worldwide, has not had a good time in the past two years. It has long been unable to extricate itself in the whirlpool of privacy and false information. In the end, it was not only fined $ 5 billion by US regulators. And, in the media shelling, the reputation has fallen to a low point, and it has become a trend to resist Facebook. It was also during this period that TikTok quickly captured the attention market of young Americans with its precise algorithms and short videos. Sense of crisis.
In 2017, Facebook also intended to acquire musical.ly, but it was eventually seized by TikTok. In the end, Facebook chose to do it himself, and launched a short video app called Lasso to fight against TikTok at the end of 2018.
Lasso ’s main functions are similar to TikTok. Users can use Lasso to record various creative short videos. In addition, users can log in to Lasso using Facebook or Instagram. At the same time, they can also share short videos on Lasso to Instagram Stories on Facebook or Instagram. Obviously, Facebook also wants to support this short video application through its strong ecology.
▲ LassoAPP screenshot
However, Lasso is obviously more like a defensive measure of Facebook. On the one hand, it almost “took” the interface and functions of TikTok from the beginning. It has suffered from bad reviews at the beginning of the launch. On the other hand, Facebook does not seem to do this app. Too many promotion actions, not only did not hold any official press conference, even the official blog did not mention it, just a middle-level product manager directly posted through social media.
Although it may just be a test of water, it is clear that Facebook has clearly regarded TikTok as a major competitor, because for Facebook, which depends almost entirely on advertising for revenue, if there is another user on the market that exceeds The billion-dollar “advertising distributor” will pose a huge threat to its revenue and growth.
From the perspective of Facebook, it is not difficult to understand why Google and its affiliate YouTube have also taken action against TikTok.
It was reported last October that Google is considering acquiring Firework, a short video application. This app is similar to TikTok, which allows users to create and share video clips. The company advertises itself as “The Future of Social Mobile Video.” In a round of financing in the first half of last year, Firework received a valuation of $ 100 million. Although there is no final news for this transaction, whether it is to buy Firework or launch a new short video function based on YouTube’s huge user base, it is clear that Google will no longer be indifferent to the rapid development of TikTok.
The competition between Facebook and Google may be more like a thunderstorm in a short period of time, but the pressure on the regulatory level is an important issue that TikTok really needs to face and needs to be resolved.
In July 2018, TikTok was once blocked by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology of Indonesia because of “a large amount of bad content, which is very unfavorable for the growth of young children”. TikTok then set up a liaison office in Indonesia and formed a 20-person review team. Responsible for the content management of TikTok and the communication with the Indonesian government, and finally exchanged to understand the seal.
According to a Bloomberg Business Week report in 2019, TikTok has deleted more than 6 million videos that violate user agreements and community guidelines in the rapidly expanding Indian market. TikTok employs nearly 500 people in India, and will continue to expand the team size in the future. Obviously, the huge number of users brings a huge workload for content review. Even so, in April 2019, TikTok was once banned from downloading by the Indian government.
▲ Source: IC photo
The more difficult issue has always been the North American market. In November 2019, the US government announced that it would conduct a national security review of TikTok parent company ByteDance ’s acquisition of the US social media application musical.ly in 2017. The US Federal Trade Commission FTC then fined TikTok US $ 5.7 million because the latter illegally collected the names, email addresses, and residential addresses of minors under 13 years of age. Many national departments, including the US Navy and Army, have banned the use of TikTok on government mobile devices.
When Jun, who was the founder of musical.ly and now in charge of TikTok, was interviewed by the New York Times when these disputes occurred last year, when faced with the question of whether TikTok will have a risk of data leakage, he said: “No, TikTok does It will review videos that offend China. It does not share user data with China or even with Beijing-based parent company.
All data for TikTok users worldwide is stored in Virginia and has a backup server in Singapore. “However, the US government, which has always been severely faced with privacy issues, is probably difficult to be persuaded by this rhetoric. After all, Zuckerberg’s robotic question in Congress failed to avoid Facebook from being severely punished.
This is the next problem that TikTok needs to face. The hindsight of Facebook and Google will not last long. In addition, these two platforms have always been the promotion positions for domestic companies to rely on the sea. Competition, the situation will only be more unfavorable.
At the same time, there are still gaps between China and the United States. In the case of Chinese companies listed in the United States such as Ruixing and Zoom, which have been repeatedly exposed by large amounts of data fraud and leaking user privacy, the regulatory pressure that TikTok will face in the future will only increase. This is by no means a problem that Zhang Yiming let go of its business in China to focus on overseas markets, solicit a chief information security officer for TikTok, or TikTok opened a “transparency center” in Los Angeles for external observers to watch how the internal team can review the content. .