INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
It almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram& said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok
during an all-hands meeting
TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment that vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a
selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what you&re up to
TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.
That why Zuckerberg comments cast a dark
shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps
How can it beat what it doesn''t understand? He certainly can''t ignore it
Facebook copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the
same period outside of China
Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.
TikTok
Casey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and
transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q-As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July
His comments touch on the company plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President
He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says &does that still suck for us? Yeah.& Zuckerberg also
describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by year end as Libra deals with regulatory
scrutiny.
But beyond his comments on regulation, it his pigeonholing of TikTok that most alarming
It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on
Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to
destroy.
Zuckeberg Thoughts On TikTok
Here what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q-A sessions, (emphasis mine):
So yeah
I mean, TikTok is doing well
One of the things that especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies
that were primarily American companies
And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China
And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia
Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia
Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is
really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world
It starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks
It growing really quickly in India
I think it past Instagram now in India in terms of scale
So yeah, it a very interesting phenomenon.
And the way that we kind of think about it is: it married short-form, immersive video with browse
So it almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts
I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app
And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff
So we have a number of approaches that we&re going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso that a standalone app that we&re
working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones
We&re trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in
countries where they are big.
We&re taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on
stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there
But yeah, I think that it not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing
But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what they&re doing, I think it is quite interesting
I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend
It is growing, but they&re spending a huge amount of money promoting it
What we&ve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising
So the space is still fairly nascent, and there time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here
But I think this is a real thing
It good.
To Zuckerberg credit, he not dismissing the threat
He knows TikTok is popular
He knows it growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising
And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.
Lasso
But while TikToks might look like Stories because
they&re vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, it a whole ‘nother beast of a
product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.
To crystallize why, let rewind to Snapchat
With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens
Facebook attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction
In fact, none of Facebook standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users
were forced to download them like Messenger
It wasn''t until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchat user count went from
growing 18% per quarter to shrinking
There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerberg comments — push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isn''t
popular yet.
But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasn''t that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on
Instagram — tiny biographical snippets of their lives
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebook News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera
All users had to know was &I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear&
The concept of Instagram and Facebook didn''t have to change
They were still about telling friends what you were up to
Choking off TikTok growth will be much more complicated.
Why TikTok Is Tough To Clone
TikTok isn''t about you or what you&re doing
It about entertaining your audience
It not spontaneous chronicling of your real life
It about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes
It not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage
And it not about originality — the heart of Instagram
TikTok is about remixing culture — taking the audio from someone else clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a
video you record.
That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they
add the remixing functionality
Most videos on those apps aren''t designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are
Insta and Facebook social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but don''t encompass the new wave of
amateur performers TikTok elevates
And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone else creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesn''t offer much to
remix.
That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users&
understanding of these apps& purpose…at the risk of distracting from their core use cases
This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November
But as we&ve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen
Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of
its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.
The Next Feed
Facebook best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a
successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly
It already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video
But it still failing to gain serious traction in the US
While typical videos on the TikTok homepage where I&m spending a few hours a week have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in
my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.
TikTok trounces Facebook Lasso in the US iOS App Store charts
I had Sensor Tower run some
analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the
Some more stats:
US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso & 250,000 // TikTok & 41.3 million
US Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso &
760 // TikTok & 126,000
Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso & #155 // TikTok & #2
Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched
in one other market, Mexico in April, where it been faring better but could hardly even 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 coherent place for TikTok style features inside
Instagram and potentially Facebook
That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content
Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for
One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put
their own spin on.
Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the
most prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch
Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it can''t afford that again.
If Zuckerberg approaches
TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed
If he doesn''t decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole
concept of short form performative video
Snapchat insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isn''t nimble enough to reinvent itself.
If no American
company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese
political values at odds with our own
If only Twitter hadn''t killed Vine.
