The Meteoric Rise of TikTok.

2020 has been an year of chaos, uncertainty, and grief.

A global pandemic, record unemployment, and nationwide protests have left people reeling. Through it all though, there’s been TikTok, providing moments of levity and new dance crazes, interspersed with more serious criticism on the issues that we face.

TikTok, it’s like the party you want to be at the moment.

You’ll see hair tutorials, cooking tutorials. People can create challenges, they can create duets, they can interact and engage. TikTok is, if you don’t know, the most downloaded app in 2020.

Since its global release less than two years ago, TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin, has amassed over 800 million monthly active users, more than Reddit, Snapchat, or even Twitter. Its parent company, ByteDance, is the most valuable startup in the world. Its reach might surprise you, but as millions scramble for connection amidst quarantines, more and more users of all ages are hopping aboard. However, it’s not all rosy, though. The Chinese-owned app faces a slew of regulatory hurdles, privacy concerns, and allegations of censorship.

The predecessor to TikTok was an app called Musical.ly. Founded in 2014, it provided a platform for users to create short, 15 second videos set to a song of their choice. The content mostly involved lip-syncing and dancing, and it took off quickly among preteens and teens worldwide. This is an app that was built around the fact that there was music that was licensed to be used on this app(which in my opinion, is a really big deal for an app). This was something that Musical.ly decided really to invest in because they knew that music and sharing music was inherently social.

By July 2015, a year after its launch, Musical.ly became most downloaded in the Apple App Store. It continued to grow and was bought by the Beijing-based startup ByteDance for 1 Billion Dollars in 2017. At this time, ByteDance had already owned TikTok, a similar video sharing platform, and then merged the two apps less than a year later. Now TikTok’s main office is in Los Angeles, California. They’re essentially an AMERICAN startup that is FUNDED by a successful CHINESE tech company.

As the app has grown, it’s given rise to a whole new pack of social media celebrities. It isn’t the sketches that you saw on Vine, and it isn’t longer-form YouTube videos. It was meme culture or like the general public’s take on a meme. Viral dances and memes have propelled many songs to the top of the India music charts, most famously, Astronomia(Coffin Song).

Many of the most followed users are in their teens and lip-syncing and dancing remain wildly popular. There’s like creators who are huge when it comes to comedy or lip-syncing, but you can do whatever you want as long as it’s fun, it’s quick and it catches people’s eyes. Lockdowns and quarantines have propelled the app’s rapid growth in worldwide. So, between October and March, according to research data from Comscore’s website, TikTok’s unique visitors have grown from 27M to 52M, so doubled in the past five months. That’s a big deal for Snapchat and Instagram, as those two are the app’s main competitors.

But TikTok is huge in Asian countries, especially like ours(India) and China.

In China, it operates as a technically separate but very similar app called Douyin. And in the first quarter of 2020, TikTok and Douyin were downloaded 315 million times globally, a 68 percent increase over the previous year. In April 2020, the company reached two billion overall downloads.

India is by far the app’s largest market when it comes to downloads, accounting for 30.3% of the total. But China is the largest from a revenue standpoint, accounting for about 72% of total spending on the app. The U.S. is third in terms of downloads and second in terms of revenue, although it continues to grow.

Its parent company ByteDance is valued at over $100 Billion and made $3 Billion in revenue last year. But at the end of the day, I think TikTok is a startup company with hundreds of millions of users worldwide, that’s still not making as much money as it could someday.

Keeping monetization aside, many say that TikTok’s first priority needs to be the regulatory and privacy concerns facing the app, which stem from its Chinese ownership as well as its popularity among children. You know, it’s never been the case that so many Indians are putting so much of their visual data in the hands of a Chinese company. And as we know, the relationship between the Chinese government and Chinese corporations are a pretty tight one.

While TikTok claims that all Indian user’s data is stored within India and is not subject to Chinese law, many security experts remain skeptical, as our data protection laws are weaker and thus citizens are more vulnerable.

Several incidents over the years have provided ample reason for worry.

1. Most recently, the app received criticism for what it said was a technical glitch, in which post tagged with #BlackLivesMatter and #GeorgeFloyd appeared to have 0 views when they have over 2 Billion.
2. In February 2019, the company paid $5.7 Million to the FTC to settle charges that it was illegally collecting children’s personal information. While TikTok said it would make changes, in May 2020 a coalition of consumer groups filed a complaint stating that TikTok had not kept its promises.
3. Lastly, there are ongoing issues regarding children’s privacy. Users under 13 are technically not allowed on TikTok, but there’s not much preventing them from signing up.

And in the past, both India and Indonesia have instituted brief bans on the app due to concerns over inappropriate content like violence and pornography.

Following the Galwan Valley clash between India and China, and keeping in mind the data security issues of its citizens in the recent past, Govt. of India banned TikTok along with 58 other Chinese apps on 29th June 2020. Further, Govt. of India prepared a list of 79 questions to be answered by TikTok about how the user data was stored and used. According to some reports doing rounds online, The U.S. is also planning to ban TikTok following user data privacy issues.

Beyond that, TikTok’s new policies have both analysts and creators excited about what new forms of content may lie on the horizon.

To make TikTok sustainable, they are going to have to do long-form content. I don’t see a version where you make 60-second videos forever and it stays cool for another two to three years.

To sum up, I see TikTok as a really powerful social media platform that has been exponential growth and yet has the potential to do even more. However, its potential growth is held back mainly due to a lack of censorship and regulations as a platform altogether. I think what’s next for TikTok is how they figure out how to make money, how they figure out how to regulate content on their platform, and how they make sure that content creators themselves want to stick around and don’t want to go jump off to whatever the next cool app is going to be.