Headline, July 03 2024/ ''' BRIEFING -TIKTOKING- BRIGHTLY '''

''' BRIEFING -TIKTOKING-

 BRIGHTLY '''

TIKTOKING ALONG NICELY : TIKTOK is fast monetising this attention. Its revenues were about $4 billion year before last, and should reach $ 12 billion this year and $ 23 billion in 2024, nearly all from advertising.

That is more than Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and other apps in the second tier of social media and would put it on par with YouTube.

HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF SHORT CLIPS UPLOADED to TikTok are causing sleepless nights in both Western capitals and Silicon Valley. The app is growing at a pace that has startled competitors and regulators.

In just five years it has broken into the top tier of global social media, a club that American officials used to consider so closed to competition that they started an antitrust case against its leading member, Facebook.

As TikTok hovers up users, and the advertising dollars that follow them, its larger rivals are rewriting their own apps to mimic the young upstart. The shake-up may not end there : TikTok's move into e-commerce could disrupt another industry.

Governments eye TikTok nervously for different reasons. As the first consumer-facing app from China to take off in the West, TikTok is a source of pride in Beijing. But the Chinese ownership makes politicians elsewhere uneasy about its tightening grip on their citizens' attention.

Users' data could end up in the wrong hands, they fear, or their viewing could be moulded by Chinese propagandists. TikTok has already been banned in India, formerly its largest market. Other countries, including America are considering their next move.

It was ten years ago that Zhang Yiming, a bookish Chinese entrepreneur a year older than Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, founded a software firm called ByteDance. Among its first creations were Neihan Duanzi [ Inside Jokes ], a platform for sharing gags, and Toutiao [ Headlines ], a news aggregator.

The apps used artificial intelligence [AI] to learn what kind of sketches or stories users liked. Both took off ; today Toutiao is China's biggest news aggregator with over 36 million users.

Mr. Zhang soon wondered what else his algorithm might do. In 2016 ByteDance released  Douyin [ Shaking Sound ], an app for recording and sharing lip-sync videos. Douyin was modeled on Musical.Iy, another Chinese-made lip-syncing app that was popular with young Americans, but enhanced by ByteDance's AI discovery engine.

It was a hit. The following year Byte-Dance released a twin app outside China, with an identical interface and algorithm but separate content. It used Douyin's logo of a juddering musical quaver but had a snappier name :  TikTok.

At first TikTok was little noticed outside Asia. But in 2017, ByteDance bought Musical.ly and soon transferred its 100 million users to TikTok. TikTok has since grown like no other app.

In September, when it was a little over four years old, it reached 1 billion users, a milestone that Facebook, YouTube and Instagram took eight years to pass, albeit at a time when fewer people were online.

It has been the world's most downloaded app since early 2020. And whereas young audiences are like worm about Facebook, TikTok has them hooked. Some 44% of its American users are under 25, believes eMarketer, a data company, compared with 16% of Facebook's.

TikTok makes creating films easy. It has done for video-editing what Instagram did for photo-editing a decade ago, allowing amateurs to turn wobbly recording into slick-looking films.

Better yet, the AI discovery algorithm dangles the prospect of viral success before unknowing creators, who struggle on apps like Facebook, which reward those with lots of followers.

Whereas the biggest personal accounts on Facebook are of athletes, singers or other celebrities, the top TikTokers are famous for being TikTokers.

Khaby Lame, a Senegalese silent comic, leads the pack with 146 million followers. Star creators have been pampered - and paid - by the company to stay on the platform.

TikTok is also easy to watch. Whereas most social-media apps recommend content from the user's network of friends, TikTok requires no network, no searching, nor even any login :

Its algorithm plucks videos from its vast archives and learns what the viewer likes. The format is supremely addictive.

In America TikTok's users spend an average of 46 minutes a day on the app, a fraction longer than spend on YouTube and 16 minutes longer than on Facebook or Instagram.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Social Media, TikTok, Viewers and the World continues. The World Students Society thanks The Economist.

With most respectful dedication to TikTok, Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See You all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - for every subject in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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