photo credit: Nghiem Pham
Lots of teens are interested in a large selection of trendy new clothes, room decorations, hygiene products, electronics and more at discounted prices and with free, quick shipping. There’s an online shopping site that offers all of that and more, it’s not Amazon or Temu. It’s TikTok.
The shop feature of TikTok launched globally in September 2023, but TikTok began testing out e-commerce features in 2020 and began serious beta testing in 2022, according to The New York Times.
The TikTok app we know now launched globally in fall 2018, as a merger with the app Musically. The Musically era of the app was straightforward lip syncing and dance videos. With the rebrand into TikTok there became a mix of traditional Musically styled dances and short form comedic videos. All videos were capped at 15 seconds.
We consider this era of the app as the peak of TikTok content wise. Many videos were short and comedic while others stuck to the app’s roots with dances and music based videos. The format of 15 second videos in immediate succession of each other felt like a breath of fresh air compared to other social media apps.
The biggest video-based social media app competitor to TikTok at the time was YouTube which we felt was getting stale due to overly long videos and lots of ads. YouTube also had an outdated landscape video format which doesn’t align with the current phone use habits of many people.
Over the past few years online shopping has become extremely popular for a multitude of reasons. The quarantine of 2020 forced a lot of people who wouldn’t normally shop online to begin doing so. The speed, convenience and pricing of online shopping has made it what it is today.
TikTok took these traits and ran with it. Convenience wise the TikTok shop isn’t a separate app but instead the shop features are integrated into the TikTok app that millions of millions of people already have. Pricing wise TikTok shop has been offering mass deals to customers and offers free shipping for all customers.
While TikTok Shop has amassed millions of dollars in revenue, the app’s content has taken a major loss in our opinion. TikTok’s video-based earning has gotten harder and harder to achieve. Previously videos were only 15 seconds long and accounts would get paid per view count.
Now TikTok content creators must create minute long videos and achieve watch time goals, something very hard to achieve on the fast-paced app, to make money. On the other hand, TikTok Shop is offering creators money for sales.
With those two factors in mind a lot of TikTok content creators have quickly transitioned from entertaining videos into TikTok Shop product advertising machines.
On the creator’s side of things, we believe that it makes sense to achieve more financial success through the app. However, as a consumer on TikTok the app has lost a lot of entertainment value. A lot of our favorite comedic creators have stepped away from skits and comedic videos into advertisements for products we don’t really care for. And without a separation of TikTok entertainment videos and TikTok Shop ads it’s really hard to enjoy the app as a whole as someone who isn’t that invested in online shopping.
With all this international revenue going to a Chinese owned company and a lot of the business happening in the United States, in April, President Biden signed off on a law that essentially puts TikTok in an ultimatum. Sell ownership to an American company or cease to continue business in the country.
We believe TikTok will be banned from the United States despite the large revenue the country is generating for the app through viewership and shop features. TikTok is making lots of money on a global scale and it’s not looking like the United States government or TikTok’s ownership is giving in.
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