TikTok has grabbed attention in world of short attention spans

With more than 500 million users in at least 150 countries, TikTok has rapidly become a household name and raging commercial success, a prime example of how an app in a sea of competition can strike big in a global, young, technologically savvy market that seems to be ever-expanding.

The rewards in this race seem to be exponentially increasing year by year. Competition is fierce however, and this Game of Thronesesque battle for top position on our smartphone home screens is a constant game of chess, between some of the largest and most powerful companies in the world.

As with all apps, success does not come without attention, and in the technology industry, especially, ideas are replicated, often bilaterally, and attempts to introduce similar services to another app's own endemic base of users are commonplace.

In November 2018, just after TikTok first purchased the Chinese based lip-syncing musical app Musical.ly, Facebook also developed its own app called Lasso. Lasso is not widely known or adopted in 2020, but just like TikTok, it allowed users to create 15-second pieces of content in video format with dubbed-over music or vocal recordings.

Fast-forward to summer 2020, and Facebook-owned Instagram's Reels service, which also allows users to create 15-second videos to music is being launched. Funding incentives for creative influencers on TikTok have also been offered, in an attempt to grow a talent community for Reels, and take advantage of the 850 million or so worldwide users who use Instagram. The copying of trendy app formats is something that has drawn criticism in the past of big corporations, such as Instagram, especially when the app emulated Snapchat through Instagram Stories in 2016, which also enabled users to post video updates that expired automatically after 24 hours.

In response, Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom said to TechCrunch: "They deserve all the credit. This isn't about who invented something. This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it."

Whether seen as industry plagiarism or innocent inspiration, TikTok has since followed in Snapchat's footsteps as being the latest app in the spotlight that power-players around the world are watching and taking note of.

The bottom line is advertising revenue. Companies such as Facebook face advertisement load saturation in their feed, and it is quite possible that the same may be the case for Instagram stories. The same user-base is inevitably having its tolerance tested for exposure to adverts on the same app through feed scrolls, stories, and now the TikTok-esque Reels service. TikTok on the other hand, is expected to generate $500 million this year in the US, and therefore still has room to grow advertisement revenue.

This saturation in the market for more established companies such as Facebook means that, although this constant updating of its app services to reflect market trends is met with some success, they may eventually need to innovate soon and create a new novel source of engagement, to continue to both grow in revenue and meet investor growth expectations. The competition for top place in the short form media app world is fierce, and fast-paced action and reaction are vital for survival in an environment where our attention is only needed for 10-15 seconds.

Barry He is a London-based columnist for China Daily