Zuckerberg misunderstands the huge threat from TikTok – TechCrunch

"It's almost like Explore Tab that we have on Instagram" said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during a meeting with all hands. But it's not. TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that is very different from life logging on Instagram where you can just take a selfie, view something neat or pan around what you are passionate about. TikToks is superimposed, storyboarded and vastly different from the random stories about Insta.

That's why Zuckerberg's comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook app family. How can it beat what it doesn't understand? He certainly can't ignore it. Facebook's copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it was launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installations in the same period outside of China. Oh, and TikTok has 1[ads1].4 billion installations to date in China.

TikTok

Casey Newton from The Verge today published two hours of audio and transcriptions from two just all hand-held questions and held by Zuckerberg on Facebook in July. His comments touch on the company's plan to fight being broken by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes president. He thinks Facebook would win, but when he dares to sue the government, he says “is it still sucking for us? Yes. ”Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook works to launch a payment product in Mexico and elsewhere at the end of the year when Vågen handles regulatory oversight.

But beyond his comments on regulation, it is his pigeon horse of TikTok that is most alarming. This prevents Facebook from winning one of the most important social feeds that the business relies on. Maybe his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak depicts him thinking that TikTok is just the next Snapchat story to be destroyed.

Zuckeberg's Thoughts On TikTok

Here's what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q&A sessions, (emphasis added):

So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that is particularly remarkable about TikTok is, a while back, the Internet landscape was a kind of bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that are basically just offering their services in China. And we had Tencent trying to spread some of its services to Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a pile of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly speaking, considering global expansion, which was quite limited, and TikTok, built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants good around the world. It's starting to do well in the United States, especially with young people. It is growing very fast in India. I think it's beyond Instagram now in India when it comes to scale. So yes, it's a very interesting phenomenon.

And the way we think about it is: it's a short, engrossing video with scrolling. So it's almost like the Explore tab we have on Instagram, which today is primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts. I think of TikTok as if it were Explore by Stories, and that was the whole app. And then you had creators who worked specifically to create such things. So we have a number of approaches that we are going to take in this direction, and we have a product called Lasso which is a standalone app that we work with and trying to get the product market fit in countries like Mexico, I think one of the first introductory. We first try to see if we can make it work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.

We take a number of approaches with Instagram, including doing so that Explore is more focused on stories that are increasingly becoming the primary way people consume content on Instagram, as well as a few other things there. But yes, I think it's not just one of the more interesting new phenomena and products growing. But when it comes to the geopolitical implications of what they do, I think it's pretty interesting. I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend. It is growing, but they are spending huge money promoting it. What we've found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising. So the place is still quite beginning and it's time for us to figure out what we want to do here. But I think this is a real thing. It is good.

To Zuckerberg's recognition, he does not reject the threat. He knows that TikTok is popular. He knows that growing in important international markets Facebook and Instagram rely on to keep user counts growing. And he knows his company needs to respond via the standalone clone Lasso and more.

Lasso

But while TikToks may look like stories because they are vertical videos, and TikTok can algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it's a whole animal of a product and one that may be more difficult than it seems to copy.

To crystallize why, let's rewind to Snapchat. With the launch of Stories, it began to burst with American teenagers. Facebook's attempt to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction. In fact, none of Facebook's standalone apps have succeeded unless they split by an already popular piece of Facebook as a chat, and users were forced to download them as Messenger. It wasn't until Zuckerberg stuck his clone with Stories up front and on top of Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat's user numbers went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking. There, Facebook used the same strategy added in Zuckerberg's comments – push the good enough clone into countries where the original is not yet popular.

But Facebook was lucky because stories weren't really unlike the content users were sharing already on Instagram – tiny biographical snippets of their lives. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook's News Feed through the lens of a volatile camera. All users had to know that "I take the same videos, but shorter and shorter, posted more often, and then they disappear". The concept of Instagram and Facebook did not need to change. They were still about telling friends what you were up to. Tackling TikTok's growth will be much more complicated.

Why TikTok is hard to clone

TikTok is not about you or what you do. It's about entertaining the audience. It is not spontaneous chronicling of your real life. It's about finding out characters, dressing up like someone else, and making jokes. It's not about privacy and friends, but strikes on the world stage. And it's not about originality – the heart of Instagram. TikTok is all about remixing culture – taking the sound of other people's clips and reflecting the gag in a new context by putting it on top of a video you record.

It makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoe in on Instagram or Facebook, even if they add the remixing functionality. Most videos on these apps are not designed to be templates for messages such as TikToks. Insta and Facebook's social graphs are rooted in friendship and enhanced by the beautiful and famous, but do not include the new wave of amateur athletes TikTok promises. And since each post to the app feeds the creativity of others, a competitor from the bottom doesn't offer much to remix.

That means a TikTok clone had to be buried somewhere on Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users' understanding of the purposes of these apps … at risk of distracting from their core use cases. This leaves Facebook hoping to expand its standalone TikTok clone Lasso that TechCrunch scooped a year ago before launching it in November last year. But as we've seen, Facebook struggles to grow brand new apps, and that effort is further hampered by the increasingly toxic brand and shine of innocence. It also doesn't help that Facebook has to divert development resources to meet all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $ 5 billion fine and settlement.

Next Feed

Facebook's best option is to consider the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and use a larger portion of the large sum to compete directly. Some smart additions have already been made to Lasso as tutorials on how to remix and the ability to add GIFs as part of your video. But there is still no serious traction in the United States. While typical videos on the TikTok website where I spend a few hours a week have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the tops I saw in my Lasso feed today were 70 or fewer.

TikTok trounces Facebook's Lasso in US iOS App Store charts

I got Sensor Tower to analyze TikTok with Lasso since launching last November and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the United States. Some more statistics:

• Total US downloads since November: Lasso – 250,000 // TikTok – 41.3 million
• American downloads per day since November: Lasso – 760 // TikTok – 126,000
• Average US Google Play Social App Chart Rating: Lasso – # 155 // TikTok – # 2

Beyond the United States, Lasso has just launched in another market, Mexico in April, where it has fared better, but could hardly be considered a competitor to TikTok. Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:

• Mexico total downloads since April: Lasso – 175,000 // TikTok – 3.3 million
• Mexico Downloads per day since November: Lasso – 1,000 // TikTok – 19 000

Zuckerberg may need to find a consistent place for TikTok-style features on Instagram and potentially Facebook. It may be another horizontal row of previews such as Stories and / or a headline on the Explore page dedicated to overlaid content. Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that no one still asks for. One way to best enable TikTok would be to build a dedicated remix source browser in the Stories camera to help users find content to spin their own.

Facebook will also have to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most productive video meme or challenge inventors to provide users with trends to jump on instead for only one-off clips to watch. The failure to offer IGTV star monetization has led many to ignore that platform and cannot afford it again.

If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as just an algorithmic video recorder like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed. If he does not decide to challenge TikTok soon, the catalog of content for remix will be prohibitive, and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video. Snapchat's insistence on ephemeral makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube is not quick enough to reinvent itself.

If no American company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forgotten to an app that, while lovely to use, heralds Chinese political values ​​in violation of our own. If only Twitter hadn't killed Vine.