TikTok is probably the most honest app for overseas friends.
In the official tone, it resembles a flood of beasts, discouraged teenagers, and the CEO has been dragged to Congress for questioning. But the people who really decided TikTok's status and made it a big problem for Zuckerberg were the people who actually used the app.
As the international version of Douyin, TikTok's popular route is very similar to that in China, and the cultural environment is very different at home and abroad.
Recently, another survey found that foreigners also love to swipe gifts in the live broadcast room, spending $10 billion in 7 years.
According to the data platform dataAccording to AI statistics, TikTok has reached a milestone: the first non-gaming app to generate $10 billion in in-app purchases on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
In-app purchases, referred to as in-app purchases, refer to spending money to purchase additional services within the app, such as VIP ads for ** apps and virtual items for game apps.
TikTok's in-app purchases mainly come from users' tips in the live broadcast room, and when the streamer withdraws the virtual gift, TikTok gets a 50% share of it.
data.AI data is calculated from 2016 onwards, including TikTok's iOS and Google Play, and Douyin's iOS. So, TikTok's android market is excluded, and the real turnover should be more.
There are only five apps that have reached the 10 billion level, and except for TikTok, the other four are popular mobile games, including Candy Crush Saga, Honor of Kings, Monster Pinballs, and Clash of Clans.
It can be seen how fierce TikTok and Douyin's live broadcast tips are.
data.According to AI, users in the United States and iOS users in China are the main tips, each bringing in about 30% of the revenue. In addition to the two tied for first place, Saudi Arabia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan are at the top of the list, which together account for 13%.
Domestic live broadcast tipping and big brother Bang Yi are more common, but we may not have thought that foreign friends also love to watch live broadcasts so much, and they are so generous that they can withstand the other half of the sky.
What are they all looking at on TikTok?
I took the new account that I haven't been washed by the algorithm and swiped the live broadcast, playing games, astrology and fortune telling, singing and dancing with beauty anchors, and bringing goods with jewelry and jade that have been named by 315, and the probability of appearing is relatively high.
In addition, there are also many slow live broadcasts that focus on daily style and companionship, where chefs fry meat, artists paint, fast food restaurant employees serve meals, workshop workers assemble products, and nail technicians repair nails. It may have been broadcast for more than ten hours when you click in.
Not to mention, the sizzling sound of barbecue, combined with the soothing background** and the anchor's unhurried and impatient movements, does have some ** effect. This kind of live broadcast is also common in China, and some southern roadside stalls will broadcast live while frying noodles on the street.
At the same time, TikTok live broadcasts also have some special genres with a special style of painting, especially emphasizing interaction, attracting viewers to give gifts.
In 2022, Australia's TikTok creator Jakey Boehm, who went live from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., made 3$40,000, among the top 50 TikTok rankings.
Sleeping while lying down is not technical, Boehm's innovation is to gamify sleep, setting up rooms, scripting and customizing wake-up calls to wait for presents from viewers, with different effects at different price points, ranging from 50 cents to $600.
At the most lively time in the live broadcast room, there were as many as 8,000 viewers, and every 10 to 20 seconds, there was a wake-up service, turning on the lights and activating the inflatable device. Boehm not only has a creative mind, but also a vivid presence, and he understands that what the audience wants to see is the collapse and anger of being too noisy to sleep.
After this form became popular, many imitators appeared, and disturbing sleep, interrupting work, etc. became a popular live broadcast routine on TikTok.
There was no road on the earth, but when there were more people walking, it became a road, and some people opened up another road. In July, Montreal, Canada-based streamer Pinkydoll went viral for her NPC (non-player character in the game) style.
The streamer pretended to be an NPC with preset rules, and when a gift was given in the live broadcast room, she reacted, staring at the camera and repeating lines like "Ice cream is delicious" like a robot, and the live-action performance of Uncanny Valley déjà vu earned $3,000 for 1 to 2 hours of live streaming.
It turns out that netizens at home and abroad are sometimes quite unpretentious and boring, with the same curiosity psychology and similar emotional value, anchors figure out common desires, set up all kinds of fresh gimmicks, try all the things that attract attention, leave passing audiences, and also leave their comments and gifts.
In recent months, TikTok has also seen the rise of 24-hour live streaming. The anchor's camera is aimed at all rooms in the home, and life is often as plain as we are, but there are a lot of people watching the excitement in the live broadcast room.
Voluntarily living in Truman's world may be difficult to understand, but it is also a kind of gimmick, and every minute they have the opportunity to receive gifts, which can make five thousand or even fifty thousand dollars a week.
Kieran, a reporter for tech insiders, once forced himself to watch a TikTok live stream for one night. After the experiment, his feelings were mixed, high EQ is the experience itself is interesting, and low EQ is a witness to the diversity of human beings.
Actually, regardless of the question of "this can actually make money", TikTok live streaming is a non-stop online carnival, and there is always someone who is famous and makes money for 15 minutes.
Not only live broadcast, TikTok has long dominated the Internet life of young foreign netizens.
The so-called geopolitics and data security are uncontrollable factors in the development of TikTok, and in March this year, TikTok CEO Zhou Shouzi was questioned by the US Congress for 5 hours, and the voice of banning TikTok has never stopped.
But a Pew Research Center survey this fall showed that the percentage of Americans who support the ban has declined, with adults under the age of 30 and teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 having a lukewarm attitude toward the ban and even more opposition than support.
Politics is politics, entertainment is entertainment, and TikTok's reports have sprung up like snowflakes, giving it various names.
TikTok is becoming a Gen Z search engine, where they search for restaurants, movies, and what to do because the content is easier and more interesting, and TikTok can't replace Google, but it affects Google.
Tiffany's advertisement.
TikTok is becoming the new shopping channel, with live streaming of goods that is Xi in China, from clothes to gym equipment, toys to coffee cups. The Guardian notes that the majority of Britons who place orders on live streaming are between the ages of 19 and 35.
TikTok is becoming the new ** software, where popular songs tend to also make it to the Spotify Viral 50 and the Billboard Hot 100. On December 10th, TikTok hosted its first live** event, TikTok in the Mix, and live**, with four large screens all in vertical shapes, like giant smartphones.
Singer Neil Holland on TikTok in The Mix
TikTok is also becoming a TV for young people. In November, Oscar-winning director Adam McKay's studio-produced satirical short film "Cobell Energy" was launched on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, in portrait format, updated weekly, with only one to four minutes per episode, tailored for the short** platform.
cobell energy》.
Traditional Hollywood producers can't beat it and join in, and younger audiences are indeed increasingly consuming content on TikTok. In addition to short dramas, old dramas such as "Grey Xi Doctor" were also cut into clips and distributed on TikTok, which is strictly a pirated act, but it is very popular.
The Pew Research Center summed it up right and to the point:
TikTok is becoming a one-stop content store like never before.Now, TikTok has taught Silicon Valley's social apps a good lesson, proving that in addition to advertising and e-commerce, tipping is also profitable.
$10 billion in 7 years is not a lot, and the giant's advertising business can easily accomplish several small goals. In the second quarter of this year alone, Meta's advertising revenue reached $31.5 billion, accounting for 984%。
But it also shows that in-app purchases make too little money.
Forbes reported in March that in 2022, Meta's in-app purchase revenue was only $56 million. TikTok earns more in-app purchases than Facebook, X, Snap, and Instagram combined2$0.5 billion.
In-app purchases are like rounded fractions for these social apps, but with TikTok setting an example, Apple changing its privacy policy to crack down on personalized ads, and making in-app purchases that users pay directly for is becoming more and more important.
As a result, social apps are doing everything they can to package subscription plans and launch more VIP features, or, like TikTok, improve tipping mechanisms to encourage users to tip creators directly.
In November last year, Meta began testing Instagram's gift feature, where fans can spend money to buy stars and tip short features for content from Reels.
In September of this year, the American version of Tieba Reddit also launched a similar update, and posts and comments that meet the requirements can get virtual gifts of gold coins, starting at 1$99 for 1 coin, creator withdraws 90 cents or $1 for 1 coin, and the content is highlighted.
In fact, tipping is not new overseas, YouTube has Super Chats (Super Chat) and Super Thanks, creators and platforms are divided into seven-thirds, and Twitch also has a virtual currency Hoo Coin.
But TikTok brings tipping to a more flexible and often mobile short, and we're ready to slide down to the next one.
Unlike paying for long-form content on YouTube, or watching streamers play games for hours on Twitch, where you're rooted in a fanbase, TikTok's tipping may be just for curiosity, like disturbing the streamer's sleep.
In a way, while TikTok is tipping, users are also part of the live stream, and we are paying the streamers to complete their performances, and their performances are also established because of the audience.
This is different from the logic of other platforms, which implements dataThe concept proposed by AI is mobile monetization .
Mobile monetization may sound mysterious, but it's actually paying for our attention.
The attention economy believes that attention is a resource, and everyone's attention is limited, forming a consideration relationship between limited resources and unlimited desires.
Time is money to encourage people not to lie flat, and there is another explanation here. When we spend more time on TikTok, we are paying for its content in disguise.
TikTok is like a black hole of time that is devouring the world. Last year, data analytics platform Sensor Tower calculated that TikTok users spent an average of 96 minutes a day in apps, nearly five times as much as they spent on Snapchat, three times as much as Twitter, and twice as much as Facebook and Instagram.
Whether it's time or money spent here, the barrier to entry is low.
The tipping itself is not expensive, if you buy tiktok gold coins in **, 70 gold coins only cost 0For $74, 1 gold coin can give away a rose.
It doesn't take a lot of cultural physical strength to watch short**, and it is suitable for migrant workers who have no energy to read, watch movies and play games after work, just like cold beer and potato chips after high-intensity physical labor in "Gambling Apocalypse".
In this way, everyone may send a **rose that will soon disappear from the screen.
According to marketing firm Ubiquitous, the low price of tipping attracts users who are otherwise reluctant to pay for content, leading to microtransactions that are spent and forgotten, like millions of cheap mobile games, from which users only feel that they get instant happiness.
Is it possible that TikTok itself is a lot like a game?The mainstream in-app purchase model for non-game apps is subscription, such as X's Blue V, but TikTok does not follow the usual path, and focuses on one-time purchase like games, but one is a virtual gift of **, and the other is a krypton gift package of 648 yuan.
Outside of live streaming, TikTok is also redefining what's possible with content monetization.
Although not as common as live tipping, from December 2021, both TikTok and Douyin have begun to promote short** tipping, turning more content directly into commodities.
Recently, Douyin has been rumored to test the payment model for short dramas, with a minimum of 1 yuan per episode. While paid skits were explored in 2020, this year's wind is blowing particularly strongly. Overseas netizens are also fascinated by the boss, werewolf, and vampire short dramas, and by analogy to TikTok, whether it is a single episode payment or advertising monetization, the business model should also have a lot of imagination.
In order to expand the reach of the marketing business, TikTok once told the brand:
Don't make ads, make TikTok.That's the best way to describe TikTok content, not just for branded marketing content.
Live broadcasts, commercials, skits, or ordinary short ** have all become the bricks and stones of the TikTok building. Creators try their best to attract attention, and passing viewers **time, or reward real money**. Everything above is more likely to become a commodity in a simpler and more entertaining way.