“On TikTok, the user gives the reins to the algorithm”

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The headquarters of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, in Beijing. AFP/File
We offer you this excellent contribution from RFI

What are the reasons for the enormous audience success of TikTok, the Chinese short-video platform that's competing with American giants? Océane Herrero, a journalist at Politico Europe and author of the book "The TikTok System " (Editions du Rocher), investigated its practices and the controversies surrounding them.

RFI : You write that the key to TikTok's economic success is its ultra-personalized video feed. What makes it unique?

Océane Herrero: TikTok's unique feed is a stream of videos that are continuously displayed and selected not by the user based on their subscriptions (which is what other platforms do), but by an algorithm that itself list of real mobile number database the videos that will be offered to the user based on their perceived interests. It can be influenced by "likes," the accounts we follow, but also mainly by the time we spend on the videos. The user gives the reins to the algorithm to suggest what they will watch.

You say that Facebook and Instagram know our external lives. And TikTok, our internal lives...

Yes, that's the feeling of one of the users I interviewed who had a rather unique relationship with the app. She feels like she's truly found her community, or rather, that TikTok has found its community for her.

TikTok is booming, but its financial results are still very opaque. We're limited to estimates. What do we know?

ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, isn't publicly traded, so it's not required to publish its results. Advertising revenue is known to be growing strongly. TikTok will reach $15.2 billion in global advertising revenue in 2023, according to Warc Media. But TikTok is also spending a lot of money on its development. As far as we know, the company isn't yet profitable.

In your book, you look back at the history of this economic success. As an aside, it wasn't the first platform to embrace the concept of full-screen video. One of the pioneers was French...

Indeed, her name was Mindie. It was created by three students who decided to launch a short-form, full-screen video app for the iPhone. At the time, it was innovative to take up the entire screen. There was also Vine, but that disappeared after it was acquired by Twitter. Mindie then inspired Musical.ly, which was later acquired by ByteDance, which gave rise to TikTok.

Little by little, it was the Chinese who picked up the idea...

That's it, and they implemented it because it also required this ability to scale up this application, to make it global and to give it the success it has today.

The idea flourished in the 2010s with Zhang Yimin, ByteDance's founder and multi-billionaire. Who is he?

He studied computer science and quickly became fascinated by American tech entrepreneurs. He decided to follow in their footsteps with one certainty: in the world of future platforms, at least in his time, it would no longer be users who search for content, but rather content that would find users. He launched a news aggregator, Toutiao, which was very successful in China before pivoting to short video with the Douyin app, which is currently the equivalent of TikTok for Chinese users.

You talk about a strong culture of secrecy in this company. Everything happens in China and everything is decided in China...

TikTok is based in several countries in Europe. For example, they have a headquarters in Ireland, like many tech companies. They also have headquarters in Singapore. But what I learned from speaking with employees, particularly European and American, is that there are very regular exchanges on important decision-making points with ByteDance employees who are in China. It's a global company, but the decisions are made in China.