Revealing the secrets of Tik Tok’s genes and the authenticity of Tik Tok influencers’ traffic!

There are cracks in everything, that's where the light comes in.

As expected, under the pressure from BAT , Toutiao found a crack and ignited the fire of national carnival.

This kind of fiery youth is accompanied by a lot of noise: Volcano Live was involved in pornography, and the joke site was shut down.

But isn’t this true of any new force that emerges?

Perhaps, many people did not expect that Toutiao, which has risen in the information sector, could rely on "algorithms" to surpass Meipai and Miaopai in the short video field and become the most popular APP at the moment.

18 months ago, Liang Rubo, technical director of Toutiao and roommate of Toutiao founder Zhang Yiming , took the lead in establishing Douyin . Last year, Toutiao acquired the North American music short video social platform Musical.ly, which it " imitated " the "North American TikTok", for US$1 billion.

Today, “ Two Weibo and One Douyin” ( WeChat , Weibo, and Douyin) has become a label among many communication researchers. As for the Douyin bloggers, some are dismissive of the huge traffic dividend, some have reaped great rewards, and some are at a loss.

So, what is TikTok? What is the gene of Tik Tok?

This article is my personal research hobby. I would like to share with you my exploration process and my findings.

This is Douyin’s mother and his famous brothers and sisters. I won’t mention the children living abroad. Among them, special mention is Neihan Duanzi, which was the first joke-type APP to achieve success. A lot of the traffic of Toutiao APP is due to Neihan Duanzi.

Except for Wukong Q&A, the other apps are all immersive, which is the success of Toutiao's algorithm.

Through the development of Toutiao, we can understand some of Douyin’s internal genes.

But with the popularity of short videos such as Xiaokaxiu , Miaopai, Meipai, and Kuaishou , how did Douyin make a comeback in just 18 months?

Let’s first look at what Tik Tok is?

If I were to use a video to introduce TikTok, it would definitely be this one.

Tik Tok is a music-based creative short video social software and a 15-second music short video community focusing on young people.

Kuaishou is considered to be the biggest competitor of Douyin. The relationship between the two is very similar to the relationship between Tudou and Youku many years ago.

Tudou.com was founded in 2005 with the slogan: Everyone is the director of his or her life.

Youku was founded in 2006 with the slogan: The world is watching.

Kuaishou was renamed in 2014, with the slogan: Record life and record you.

Founded in 2016, Tik Tok’s slogan is: Let worship start here.

At first I thought that Kuaishou was more vulgar, more earthy, and more real, while Douyin was cooler, more trendy, and more showy. However, on media platforms, all reality is just a chosen reality. After all, everyone has limited time.

Now, Youku’s slogan has been changed to: This world is cool, and Douyin’s slogan has been changed to “Record a beautiful life”. "Recording" also becomes a part of choosing to perform or present. This is the truth about social interaction.

So how did Tik Tok become so popular step by step? Where does Tik Tok’s traffic come from?

What I remember most is "The Rap of China" produced by iQiyi . In my opinion, this subculture hip-hop variety show is a big gamble for all sponsors.

What makes Tik Tok excited is that they won the bet, and this variety show is undoubtedly the most popular program in 2017.

Afterwards, the cooperation between Douyin and variety shows unfolded one after another, and variety shows such as Happy Camp and Street Dance of China became the connecting media between it and young people.

In addition to the investment in variety shows, Yue Yunpeng's imitator Yue Yunyun on Douyin actually attracted Yue Yunpeng's attention and brought a lot of traffic. (Yue Yunyun’s traffic on TikTok is average.)

During the Spring Festival in February this year, Douyin exploded and began to learn from Sina Blog's celebrity route, recruiting celebrities such as Lu Han , Wu Yifan, Li Yifeng, etc. During the Spring Festival, Douyin even invited celebrities such as Dilraba Dilmurat, Zhou Dongyu, Angelababy, He Jiong, etc. to send red envelopes, attracting a large number of fans to register and pushing Douyin's traffic to a climax.

During this period, Douyin has held joint activities with NetEase Cloud Music , Mobike, etc., as well as offline activities such as "Douyin Chengdu ". In addition, Toutiao's main strategy of algorithm recommendation + decentralization + localization transformation has made Douyin really make its competitors tremble more and more.

Baidu Index Trend Chart of Douyin

Interestingly, the peak of TikTok traffic was in early April when TikTok closed comments.

So, how does Tik Tok motivate all parties to participate?

In terms of content, Douyin’s gameplay is more like Sina Weibo , with celebrities + MCN, attracting traffic through people and increasing high-quality traffic through the support of professional PGC .

This is different from Kuaishou's decentralized operating mechanism. Douyin will produce so-called high-quality content in disguise by signing MCNs, Internet celebrities , etc., and monetize them through advertising. At the same time, it uses "algorithms" to create popular products and encourage ordinary users to be more active. Some netizens said that Douyin will become the largest MCN.

However, for a platform to become a platform, it must allow the players on the platform to profit. Whether it is attracting fans through WeChat business or connecting with Weibo and official accounts, or even monetizing by adding Weibo and Taobao links to Douyin, all of these have become part of its incentives.

In addition, various cases of people getting rich quickly through TikTok, as well as successful business cases, have attracted more users and businesses to participate.

According to data provided by Toutiao’s business staff, Toutiao’s average daily video playback volume exceeds 1 billion, and its daily active users are in the millions.

According to information provided by Qimai Data, Tik Tok has almost been ranked first in the free download list for the past three months.

The declaration when downloading the Douyin APP is: All the fun people are here.

So, how is the revenue of Tik Tok? How is it monetized?

According to bianews, a media outlet under the Chinese self-media company WeMedia, Douyin's daily revenue is 32 million yuan, and its monthly revenue reaches 960 million yuan. According to this calculation, its annual revenue exceeds 10 billion yuan. Of course, this has not been confirmed by the official Douyin.

According to the PPT provided by the business staff of Jinri Touhou, Tik Tok is a music short video community that is keen on creating beauty and expressing oneself. There are five ways to cooperate:

In April, at least five business personnel from Toutiao asked me whether I wanted to place advertisements, which shows how strong the sales efforts were. The most noteworthy thing is "cooperation with experts", which further confirms the MCN nature of Douyin.

So, who is playing Tik Tok?

According to the official media Nanfang Window, in September last year, Douyin officials revealed data showing that 85% of Douyin users are under the age of 24, and the main influencers and users are basically born after 1995 or even 2000.

Coupled with the trendy, cool and dazzling style positioning, people have the impression that people on Douyin are wealthier and more avant-garde.

This impression can not only bring value to the platform, but also attract participation from so-called subculture groups. After all, subculture is the next mainstream culture, and subculture people are the next mainstream people.

I tried to get closer to a younger group, so I registered on TikTok, using the same name “Uncle Ashang” (don’t follow me, it’s embarrassing after all). I was curious about what they were watching and doing.

What kind of content is considered a hit on TikTok?

I watch Tik Tok while lying on the sofa after a day of work. The content I pay attention to is mostly beauties, beautiful scenery, pets, funny things and cool clips.

Someone summarized that on Douyin, dance, jokes, talents, imitations, inspirational stories, scenery, spoofs, flirting with girls, flirting with boys, and showing off skills are the most popular and have high traffic.

However, many people around me have tried to use Douyin, but they don’t seem to be very good.

So, who made these interesting, fun and awesome videos?

Perhaps, Xie Yang of Time Weekly found part of the answer in "The Making of a TikTok Hit: A five-minute video takes dozens of times longer to complete." In this article it is mentioned:

As for ordinary people, they may be able to learn from the twelve rules of the Onion Group on how to create Tik Tok and influencers such as Office Ono and Daigula K. As shown in the figure:

Xinbang quoted Nie Yangde, co-founder of Onion Group, as saying: "Previously, videos were show economy, and the audience just 'watched' handsome men and 'watched' beautiful women, and they were always 'spectators'. Douyin not only gives users a sense of participation, but also makes people feel a sense of gaining a better life and people and things after watching them."

However, can success really be replicated? What other secrets are behind the traffic? Is it true that Tik Tok has millions of likes and hundreds of millions of views?

Length and shortness contrast with each other, existence and non-existence give rise to each other, and the same goes for truth and falsehood. Let’s first look at a quotation sheet for brushing volume:

If you want to become a 1 million V , you only need 10,000 yuan.

If you want to share thousands of likes and reposts, you only need to choose package 8, which is 100 yuan.

As for the comments, you can also customize them, praising your beauty, praising your handsomeness, and buying whatever you want to comment on.

So how do you tell whether a Douyin influencer is inflating his or her followers?

I will still refer to the identification method I used on Weibo (reference: Crazier than celebrity fraud, revealing the traffic industry chain of fake fashion bloggers) and look at the secondary social relationships. To identify TikTok influencers, you can only look at the comments to see if the content is similar and if there are any anomalies in the TikTok ID in the comments.

I spent 100 yuan to get an ID for a newly registered Douyin user. I traced the source of this Douyin ID and randomly found a Weibo influencer whose Douyin ID is "Bao Wenjing". She is certified as an actor, and the information shows that she is Bao Beier's wife.

Okay, I'm sorry.

So, is Bao Wenjing’s data true? How to judge?

1. Everyone, please note that Bao Wenjing’s comment on this message received 97,000 likes, 3,867 comments, and 155,000 reposts. Such a ratio itself is problematic. Generally speaking, forwarding is a very deep-level operation, and the number of forwarding should be lower than the number of likes, unless there is a prize draw for the forwarding.

2. Not only that, I randomly checked some of the comments that were adjacent to each other in the middle and found that the number of likes, followers, and fans of the Douyin ID were all 0, which is very strange. Could it be that all of them were newly registered accounts and they all commented on her on this day? suspicious.

3. Among the Douyin IDs commented, the avatars of these suspicious accounts are blurred.

More importantly, this is the data ID that I introduced into this account after I purchased the Douyin video to increase the traffic.

Therefore, it is easy to tell whether the volume is inflated.

Of course, I’m not sure who swiped the data, but judging from the results, the data results are very suspicious.

Which other TikTok accounts are inflating their views? How do they brush it?

The "Sour Plum Award. List of Chinese Unrecommended Bloggers" (Season 2) that I am currently working on is now being collected. Friends who have experience in Douyin influencer advertising and know the inside story are welcome to provide clues and work with me to separate the true from the false! After all, it's too tiring for my eyes to identify them one by one.

As for the “TikTok KOL Resource Recommendation List” that many friends sent me, I have never dared to release it to the public. After all, I am a media conservative when it comes to advertising .

In my opinion, most of the Tik Tok influencers are buying bubbles. Why do I say so?

At present, the traffic of short videos is astonishing, but the traffic of fake short videos is also astonishing. The risk is too high, and it is too difficult to find a truly influential person.

What does “hundreds of thousands per line , hundreds of thousands per line excluding tax” mean? Do you dare to invest? Does it work? How to evaluate? Is it trustworthy to just rely on a bunch of superficial review and likes data?

After all, the delivery of text and pictures is different from that of videos. On mobile devices and the TikTok platform, how should you convey your message in a 15-second advertisement so that it will attract attention and be recognized? This requires more attempts and adjustments.

So, what is the future of TikTok? Should Tik Tok be the focus?

Kuaishou came first, and then there was Weishi . Producing a piece of content and sending it to three platforms has become the practice of many video experts.

In my opinion, one more channel means one more way to try. After all, your ability to deal with the unknown is what proves how mature you are. What do you think?

This article was compiled and published by @阿尚叔 (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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