Yesterday, the United States banned federal workers from downloading the TikTok viral video on government-issued devices. Today, Washington forced China to close its consulate in Houston. Tomorrow, can the United States ban TikTok altogether?
TikTok’s competitor Triller believes a total ban on TikTok in the United States is imminent. And if so, Triller is expected to get a lot of new users, as in India.
There, TikTok’s ban resulted in millions of new triller downloads.
“When TikTok closed, we literally woke up and, 24 hours later, we thought, I don’t know what it was, 40 million downloads or anything outside India,” Triller co-owner and director Ryan Kavanaugh recently told me at TechFirst. Podcast. “And all of a sudden, we were literally the number 1 app in the category.”
TikTok has been under fire recently for a number of different reasons.
It belongs to ByteDance, a Beijing-based company, at a time of developing national tensions between China and other countries. Border disputes with India led to a ban on implementation at the end of June, as well as 58 other Chinese requests. This charges TikTok for two hundred million users at once. Trade tensions have been highest between the US and China for some time, as have accusations of virtual espionage, and TikTok has been accused of leaking knowledge from the Chinese government, which the company has denied.
Those tensions led the Trump administration to communicate on the app ban, and teens retaliated by bombing Trump’s mobile apps.
They have also helped competitors, who see a historic opportunity to overthrow TikTok as the most productive app for teens. TikTok not only had about 700 million facilities in 2019; grew faster in 2020, with approximately 56 million facilities in May alone.
Triller is one option for teens worried about TikTok’s future.
It already has over 100 million downloads, so it’s not small, and is now systematically poaching top talent: the viral superstars who are fleeing TikTok to ensure they can still make influencer bank elsewhere.
“WeArray … 50 of TikTok’s most productive influencers who joined us lately,” Kavanaugh says. “And those are some of the biggest influencers, as we had TikTok’s biggest influencer of the moment.”
If TikTok does actually get banned in the U.S., that would be a new escalation in the emerging cold war between America and China. It would also leave potentially over 100 million people looking for a new app to share and view viral videos. TikTok has over 2 billion downloads globally, with around 800 million regular users. Just under 150 million have installed the app in the U.S., according to Apptopia, with some fraction of them using it regularly.
And for Triller, a ban would be justified.
“It does bother me when I hear people say it’s political,” Kavanaugh says. “Literally as you peel it back — I mean, and these are professionals who do this … it’s just spyware. Like it’s spyware with a social media thing wrapped around it.”
That might be a bit extreme.
TikTok was caught reading users’ clipboards — where text goes when you copy and paste — and is reportedly under investigation by a national security agency. But beside the clipboard item, which multiple other apps where doing, including LinkedIn, I haven’t seen a lot of hard evidence that TikTok is stealing personal data, or shipping profiles over to China. Much of what it does seems equivalent to other social apps that mine user data to target advertising.
That said: in a Chinese company, when China claims to jump, you say how high. Ultimately, to escape the highlights and continue to grow, TikTok would possibly have to convince its parent company ByteDance to sell it to a non-Chinese company.
Anyway, Triller believes he has what it takes to compete: a social platform focused on creativity that prioritizes the monetization of viral sensations.
“We used to say, ‘TikTok is not a competitor’ because we’re not really competitors,’ kavanaugh says. “
Well, unless you’re Quibi, I guess.
Get a full transcript of our verbal exchange here.
I anticipate and analyze trends that affect the cellular ecosystem. I’m a journalist, analyst and business executive, and I described the rise of cell phone.
I anticipate and analyze trends that affect the cellular ecosystem. I’ve been a journalist, analyst and business executive and I’ve chronicled the rise of the cellular economy. I created the VB Insight studio team at VentureBeat and controlled groups that create software for partners like Intel and Disney. In addition, I led technical groups, created social sites and cellular apps, and consulted on cell phones, social networks and IoT. In 2014, I named one of Folio’s 100 most sensible market specialists in the media industry as “the most innovative market and marketing specialists in the media industry.” I live in Vancouver, Canada, with my family, where I coach baseball and hockey, but not at the same time.