Short video app “Tik Tok”: Will it become popular for a while and then die?

I wrote an article before about how the rapidly growing TikTok was managed . And how do they cold start their products? Then I also give a thought at the end of the article: Will Douyin be like many phenomenal products, which will die out after a short period of popularity? I’ll give you my answer today!

It can be said that since the introduction of the Internet in China , there has never been a shortage of excellent products or excellent Internet talents, which is why today's prosperous Internet situation in China has been created. And in this long river of history, it has always been a situation of survival of the fittest. So we see many excellent products emerging that solve users’ urgent needs, but some of them are short-lived and are just a passing fad.

Among these products , there are Wandoujia , Baidu Magic Photo, and Papapa, which are invested by Professor Kai-Fu Lee , and then there are apps such as Faceu , Xiaokaxiu , Zuji , Crazy Guess Picture, and Magic Camera Fenda from other companies. It’s not that they haven’t been popular before, but the faster they became popular, the faster they fell. Almost all of these products were hastily launched with a development cycle of no more than two months, and they captured the hearts of young people in large numbers with the help of celebrity effects and intensive advertising . But most young people are just looking for a sense of novelty, not to solve their pain points, so this product is dispensable, which we also call the itch point. These rapidly popular products all have one thing in common, that is, they use a product function as their entry point. In short, a large part of them are tools aimed at realizing an innovative function , using a new function that has almost never existed in the market or has never been satisfied to leverage the entire market. For example, Zuji became popular with its first-ever movie -style blockbuster picture-making tool, and Xiaokaxiu became popular with its first-ever expression dubbing function. However, the biggest problem with these new features is that they are just functions. After successfully attracting users' attention, they can no longer stimulate users' hormones, and they can no longer bring any freshness or things worth showing off. This is the state of "When you stand naked in front of me, I won't even get hard." Products that truly have long-lasting vitality are those that start from user needs and meet users' unmet needs.

And we can see that short videos like Douyin are actually the same type as apps like Kuaishou , Miaopai , and Meipai . The difference is that Douyin only processes the short videos shot by users, adding some so-called twitch effects that young people like, reversing the video, repeating it, flashing, slowing down the video, etc., giving birth to an alternative short video . Before this, no domestic product had these special effects, and the one that was most similar to Douyin was Xiaokaxiu. Xiaokaxiu is a kind of lip-syncing parody imitation short video, which is actually focused on a functional innovation point. When it was first launched, it was also loved by many personalized users. The premise of this liking was relying on the celebrity effect and having a good godfather (Weibo). After being popular for a while, it quickly fell. Right after Tik Tok launched these “shaking” special effects, Xiaokaxiu quickly followed suit and launched the “shaking” special effects at a pixel-level imitation, but it seems that it could not reverse the decline too much.

Tik Tok video is an entertainment tool product, and we all know that tool products do not have strong user stickiness. Because it is a product based on functionality, it needs to be constantly innovated to a large extent in order to continuously inspire users to share and climax again and again. However, this kind of phenomenal product uses a product function as a breakthrough to attract users, so it cannot continuously provide users with innovative functions for them to seek excitement.

For example, Zuji became popular because it launched a new blockbuster mode with wide screen and subtitles. No matter what photo it is, it can be presented with the texture of a blockbuster movie through the blockbuster mode. The level of the photo is far higher than other photos in the circle of friends , which fully satisfies the user's desire to show off and meets the needs of young people for self-creation and personalized expression. So during that period, almost all the pictures posted on WeChat Moments and Weibo were in the style of blockbuster movies, with movie-like colors and movie-like dialogues. No matter how good something is, people will get tired of it. When the circle of friends is almost entirely filled with pictures like this, users will become aesthetically fatigued. After trying something new, they will find that being different from others is what makes them cool.

Actually, would you say that Tik Tok was the first to make “shaky” short videos? Not necessarily, because there was already an American short video social software musical.ly before it, and musical.ly is the originator of this field. Tik Tok can be regarded as a pixel-level plagiarism! The UI designs of the two are 98% similar. Both are 15-second short video social software and are also targeted at young people. musical.ly was co-founded by two Chinese entrepreneurs who left their jobs, Zhu Jun and Yang Luyu. At that time, the software was advertised as the "musical version of Instagram". Some people also called it the "American version of Xiaokaxiu (Xiaokaxiu was launched later than musical.ly)". In July 2014, it was launched simultaneously in China and the United States. So Tik Tok was only launched in 2016, so it can actually be considered an imitation, but the good thing is that Tik Tok was able to be localized. How do I actually say it? China has always liked to take successful products from Europe and the United States and refurbish them in China. We call it "borrowing-ism."

This kind of plagiarism has always existed, so you will see a lot of "American version of xxx". Although there have been many successful imitations of foreign products in the history of China's Internet, such as Meituan and even WeChat , which we are all using now, their prototypes can be found in foreign countries. But what is undeniable is that these products are not simply copied or directly imitated, but have been improved or even innovated with new functions before being accepted in China. For example, Meituan went further than Groupon only after it truly penetrated into the lives of users, and WeChat quickly surpassed WhatsApp only after it creatively launched the shake function . Therefore, there is no model that can be completely successful by copying. In addition to the well-known national conditions of China and decision-making costs, the failure of foreign teams entering China is also due to the inability or unwillingness of products to be localized in China, which is also a problem that cannot be ignored. Therefore, this is also an issue that Douyin should pay attention to. It is also a question of whether we can go further in the future.

Many phenomenal products become popular but then die out quickly. This is partly due to user stickiness and lack of demand, but most importantly, there is no clear business model . After becoming popular in the early stage, a large amount of traffic poured in, and it was also valued by capital. However, as time goes by, you will find that there is a lack of business model, and after the money is used up, no more investors will follow up. It’s not that there is no business model for short videos, but the input is greater than the output. It is actually too early to talk about the business model in a short period of time. Whether it is Douyu or some other short video platforms, they have actually been in a money-burning mode to subsidize bloggers who are their users. Because the most fundamental source of short videos is still content. Without content, there will be no users. In the past two days, Huoshan Video, a subsidiary of Toutiao, has just poached Kuaishou's top celebrity, Li Tianyou, the king of rap, for 20 million yuan. So rather than saying it is a competition of platforms, it is more of a competition of talent.

Similarly, as a latecomer in the short video industry, Douyin cannot continue to be popular just because it has innovated a new function. This is only temporary. Because the further we go, the more competition there will be for talent. Fortunately, Douyin is a project incubated internally by Toutiao, so it has no shortage of resources and traffic. However, looking back at history, many products also had a good godfather and godmother, but they still died after a short period of popularity.

The current popularity of TikTok is temporary and very short-lived. I also believe that the TikTok operation team will definitely spend a lot of money to carry out a more large-scale advertising bombardment in the future. However, if the internal problems are not resolved, it will also be doomed to die out after a short period of popularity.

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