Does TikTok’s counteroffensive plan to hit the American Instagram?
In the same days in which the Chinese giant is under accusation in the US which wants the social network to be spun off from Bytedance, TikTok is leaving behind crumbs of a project that would place the platform in direct competition with Instagram. What happens?
There's not only Spotify which, in order to get its accounts back on track (the latest quarterly was a record, but the company has also been firing people all over the place) fantasizes about trying to compete with YouTube on the video front. The geography of the Web, ever so changing, could soon see the rise of a direct competitor to Instagram, Meta's "photographic" platform: TikTok Photos.
As the name suggests, the main rival of the US app loved by very young people could therefore be… Chinese. A challenge within the challenge, considering that ByteDance has now ousted the Americans from the social media podium. At the same time, it is known, in this last remnant of democratic legislature the Americans intend to try to separate the Asian software house from its creature, under penalty of exclusion from their market, which so far has guaranteed 170 million users and record revenues on the advertising front.
TIKTOK, FACEBOOK OR INSTAGRAM: WHO WINS THE SOCIAL CHALLENGE?
In recent years the social audience has aged much faster than the terrestrial one, so to speak. While Facebook is losing younger Internet users, reducing itself to an elderly gathering of boomers, globally the ByteDance app has 1 billion teenage users who open the platform 19 times a day and, a particularly attractive fact for advertisers, are much more active than those present on other platforms in publishing or commenting on other people's content.
In short, TikTok is the most vital and buzzing social network today. The one on which it is possible to make the most money. According to the annual ranking of Brand Finance "Global 500", in the first quarter of 2023 TikTok was now worth 11% more than Facebook and 65% more than Instagram, being valued at 65.7 billion dollars, compared to 58.8 billion for Facebook (a value almost halved compared to last year) and Instagram's 33.48 billion. In 2020, TikTok was 'just' worth 1 billion.
MUCH MORE THAN A COMPETITION BETWEEN BIG TECH
As you can imagine, the game is not only economic, but now even geopolitical. So much so that relations between the US and China are rapidly deteriorating on the song and dance app. For Wang Wenbin , spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the ban on TikTok in the United States would be "an act of bullying".
Words as heavy as boulders: “even if the United States has found no evidence that TikTok poses a risk to its national security, this has not stopped it from prosecuting TikTok,” the state boyar told CNN during a press conference. For Wang Wenbin, the United States only knows how to "be a bully" when it fails to succeed in fair competition. “This will ultimately be counterproductive for the Americans themselves and will inevitably backfire on them,” he then threatened.
THE BALLET BETWEEN BIDEN AND TRUMP ON TIKTOK
While Joe Biden has already made a decision, announcing that he will vote on the law if it passes parliamentary scrutiny, even Donald Trump himself is worried about the fate of the Chinese app, a supporter with Huawei of the era of the expulsion of hi-tech brands Beijing from US soil.
The Donald, in fact, not only does not want to leave the field open to Meta, a platform hostile to him and is also tempted by the possibilities offered in the election campaign by the ByteDance platform, but he may not want to annoy billionaire Jeff Yass , a well-known Republican financier who owns 15% of ByteDance. It may be a coincidence, but the American news reports a recent meeting between Trump and Yass. The tycoon running for the White House obviously said that there was no mention of TikTok.
DOES CHINA CHALLENGE INSTAGRAM WITH TIKTOK PHOTOS?
But let's go back to the possible twist that could subvert the social balance. So far there is nothing official: it was the SP Android portal that identified traces of TikTok Photos, which found some strings in the code of the app version 33.8.4 which carry references to an unpublished TikTok Photos in their DNA. A rather suspicious coincidence, compared to the rules under discussion in the USA.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT TIKTOK PHOTOS
Especially if you consider that these traces are nothing short of shouted clues, even containing the description of the service as a place that brings together users who love photos. TikTok has long been open to uploading carousels of images in a post, but the Photos project seems to go further, envisaging an ad hoc app or a large section of the main software which, judging from that "plot" would be in direct competition with Instagram.
WHEN IT WAS MET TO DO SO…
A good and proper invasion in the field successfully cultivated so far by the American Meta. Annoying, of course, but very legal, given that competition is the basis of the liberal principles that animate markets in democracy. And then, wasn't the first social network to radically change its concept to annoy a competitor Instagram, when Meta launched its version of Twitter with Threads ?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/la-controffensiva-di-tiktok-prevede-di-colpire-lamericana-instagram/ on Fri, 15 Mar 2024 09:51:31 +0000.