INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
during an all-hands meeting
dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps
same period outside of China
Oh, and TikTok has 1.4 billion total installs beyond China to date.TikTokCasey Newton of The Verge today published two hours of audio and
transcripts from two internal-only all-hands Q-As held by Zuckerberg at Facebook in July
It foreshadows Facebook failing to win one of the core social feeds that its business depends on
Perhaps his perspective on the competitor is evolving, but the leak portrays him as thinking TikTok is just the next Snapchat Stories to
I mean, TikTok is doing well
that were primarily American companies
And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China
And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia
Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia
Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is
really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world
I kind of think about TikTok as if it were Explore for stories, and that were the whole app
And then you had creators who were specifically working on making that stuff
stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there
I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend
But I think this is a real thing
He knows TikTok is popular
And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.LassoBut while TikToks might look like Stories because
With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens
users were forced to download them like Messenger
growing 18% per quarter to shrinking
They were still about telling friends what you were up to
video you record.That makes TikTok distinct enough that it will be very difficult to shoehorn into Instagram or Facebook, even if they add
the remixing functionality
amateur performers TikTok elevates
This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November
Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of
successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly
comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US
That could be another horizontal row of previews like with Stories and/or a header on the Explore page dedicated to premeditated content
Certainly something more prominent than a single button like IGTV that still no one is asking for
One opportunity to best TikTok would be building a dedicated remix source browser into the Stories camera to help users find content to put
their own spin on.Facebook will also need to buy out top TikTok creators to make videos for it instead, and even quasi-hire some of the most
prolific video meme or challenge inventors to give users trends to jump on rather than just one-off clips to watch
TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed
concept of short form performative video
company can step up, we could see our interest data, faces, and attention forfeited to an app that while delightful to use, heralds Chinese
political values at odds with our own
