vine an app that only allowed videos up to six seconds long was created in 2012 the same year that bite dance started vine got acquired by twitter before it even officially launched and when the app went live in 2013 they rapidly built up an active user base considering this was several years before bite dance would create tick tock vine looked perfectly positioned to dominate the short video markets but by 2015 vine had a big problem all their top creators were becoming increasingly frustrated since vine offered no way to monetize their content the top graders felt
they'd helped make finer success and the vine team was basically ignoring them so the creators started posting vines to direct people to their other social media instead concerned the vine team agreed to a meeting with 18 of the top creators and heard their demands the creators wanted to be paid 1.2 million dollars a year to post three vines a week internally the twitter team were very worried about this idea they figured if they started dishing out money to content creators on vine it would set a precedent and people would start wanting money for tweets as
well but they knew losing all of their biggest content creators would look terrible so they were considering it until they realized that the top vine stars didn't want 1.2 million dollars to split between them they wanted 1.2 million dollars each and considering vine was making a loss at this point it just wasn't possible so the top stars of the platform left vine continued to struggle for money and by 2017 the app was officially dead ironically this was the year tick tock launched you see bike dance had been observing carefully and vine's brief moment in the
sun had proven the demand for short videos but also highlighted two important lessons number one don't ignore your best creators find a sustainable way to pay them and number two don't let them get too powerful now there are many reasons for tick-tock success the vast amounts of money it spent it's powerful algorithm fortunate timing good management clear strategy a fair bit of luck and many more but one of the biggest factors of all was that tiktok truly focused on creators right from day one at the beginning they'd even invite users to the bike dance offices
to chat get feedback and create videos together bike dance had learned a lot of lessons from vine but the biggest of all was about building a creator economy within its app a whole ecosystem where new creators had a real shot at going viral and the top creators had a way to profit so they'd stay loyal and in order to do that tick tock figured out a way to do the one thing i never could make a hell of a lot of money [Music] but before we look at all the many different ways tic toc makes
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free welcome bonus when you sign up after you've done that let's look at how tick tock makes so much money eventually the big tech giants realized tick tock posed a serious threat to them which is why just about every social media app launched a service that was essentially a tick tock clone instagram launched reels facebook launched lasso snapchat launch spotlight youtube launch shorts and so on in fact instagram even announced they're no longer a photo sharing app with many articles pointing out they're trying to become tick-tock but it was too little too late by that
point tick tock was a billion dollar app firstly tic toc obviously monetized with ads in the video feed but because the videos were longer than vines it was much easier to attract advertisers especially because the ads look very similar to normal videos there's just a tiny yellow ad sticker in the corner so this means brands can make their ads look like user generated content and get much higher engagement as often people don't even realize they're watching an ad tick tock can also charge higher amounts to advertisers because they have so much data about what each
person likes so the ads can be very targeted secondly tiktok created a built-in creator marketplace connecting businesses and creators together so they could make brand deals and this was the ultimate win win win for creators it gave them an easy and direct way to make money within the app for advertisers it allowed them to easily find relevant creators for their brand view their profile stats and make a secure payment without risk of getting scammed and finally for tick tock it not only made their app more appealing but also meant they could keep tabs on exactly
what deals were being made and take a share of the revenue for themselves thirdly tick tock monetized with sponsored brand challenges for example samsung worked with tiktok to create the video snap challenge where you take three different pictures and it merges them into a single image the catch is this feature is only available on samsung galaxy s21 phones so basically tick tock have found ways to blur the lines between what's content and what's an advertisement which means they can charge brands a lot more money but interestingly if we look at the chinese version of tock
we can see that bite dance have plenty more monetization tricks up their sleeve that they soon might be bringing over to tic toc for example tipping via live streams is a much more common thing there there's also a feature where any user can pay to boost their post visibility to a certain audience but most notably of all is how bike dance is planning on disrupting ecommerce yep bite dancer is not just taking on social media giants now they're taking on amazon here's how it works let's say you're browsing tick tock and you see a video
with some cherries in it and they look delicious well tick tock will show you a pop-up with a button to buy cherries your payment card and address will already be registered so you won't even need to leave the app to buy them of course this shopping feature can work with anything since tic tocs ai can tell exactly what's being shown in a video and show you a related item that you can buy essentially they want to blur the lines between content and shopping and it's easy to see how this can lead to a lot of
impulse purchases since you won't need to go actively looking for things to buy the chinese version of tick tock reported they had nearly 30 million dollars worth of sales using this feature on a single day in december 2018. the feature is very popular in china already and will likely become much more widely used on tick tock as well especially because by dance have already entered into partnerships with big companies like walmart and l'oreal but it goes further they're even experimenting with features like food delivery with me app proving there is endless potential ways to monetize
the billions of users tick tock now has and thus bike dance's focus on building a lucrative business rather than just a popular app it's what separates it from vine and many other short form video apps that were similar but never made it so was many people seem to think of tick-tock as just another vine a fad that will come and go tick-tock is already far more successful than vine could have ever even dreamed of and if you want to know the full story behind tick-tock and why it's taking over the world just click this video
right here to watch our full tik tok documentary i'll see you there cheers
