In September 2016, the Chinese company ByteDance launched the social media platform TikTok under the name of Douyin in China. However, it was not unil August 2018 that it became available worldwide, after merging with Musical.ly, another social media platform specifically built to share short video’s. In just this short period of time, the platform has expanded to more than 150 markets and reached an astonishing high MAU (monthly average user count) of an estimated 800 million, more than twice the MAU of Snapchat, Twitter and Pinterest who’ve all been around for much longer.
Instagram on the other hand, has been around from 2010. In 2012, just 2 years after its initial launch, Facebook acquired Instagram just prior to its planned IPO, for $1 billion in cash and stock. Primarily, instagram was built as a social media platform for sharing (edited) photo’s. Instagram still has a higher MAU count (+/- 1 billion) but with the current rapid growth of TikTok, this lead could be short-lived.
As with a lot of other platforms, the smaller party risks its platform being “enveloped”. This basically means that one platform provider (Instagram) adds another platform provider’s (TikTok) functionalities to its own, and then offers a multi-platform bundle. Instagram has clearly been doing this with the “Reels” feature that they just launched, as an attempt to pull as many users towards their platform instead of diverting to TikTok. To achieve this, Instagram provides basically identical features as TikTok does: creating and sharing short-form videos set to music.
Since Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) has significantly higher total reach and market capital than ByteDance, this created a head start in the battle. Also, even Donald Trump himself seems to play a role: in September, the POTUS issued an executive order stating that TikTok could be banned in America, supposedly due to national security reasons.
Could the combination of a commercial envelopment by Facebook and political ban by the Donald Trump administration mean the end of TikTok’s growth or perhaps even its existence? It is safe to say that only time will tell!
Sources:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikTok
- https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tik-tok-statistics/
- https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/102615/story-instagram-rise-1-photo0sharing-app.asp
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/08/05/instagram-intensifies-battle-with-tiktok-as-influencers-ponder-their-options/
- https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/5/21354117/instagram-reels-tiktok-vine-short-videos-stories-explore-music-effects-filters
Hey Redeëet,
I think you wrote a very relevant blog post. Of course, this is not the first time Instagram started an evelopment attack. Instagram before already copied Snapchat’s signature feature. Since then, Instagram has gone on to copy a whole bunch of other features, from face filters to disappearing messages. Now, with 300 million daily users, Instagram Stories is more popular than the entirety of Snapchat.
It is true that only time will tell if the same will happen to TikTok. iI will be very likely that Instagram will have the same effect on TikTok as it had on Snapchat, unless TikTok is able to defend it self. Now that Oracle will take over the stewardship of TikTok’s US operations, it will be very interesting to watch what is next in store. Oracle could use its technology and other company resources to strengthen TikTok’s position in the market, and maybe save TikTok from its downfall.
Kind regards,
Daniëlle van Helden