Its almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in leaked audio of him describing TikTok during an all-hands meeting.
But its not.
TikTok represents a new form of social entertainment thats vastly different from the lifelogging of Instagram where you can just take a selfie, show something pretty, or pan around what youre up to.
TikToks are premeditated, storyboarded, and vastly different than the haphazard Stories on Insta.Thats why Zuckerbergs comments cast a dark shadow over the future of the Facebook family of apps.
How can it beat what it doesnt understand? He certainly cant ignore it.
Facebooks copycat Lasso has been installed just 425,000 times since it launched in November, while TikTok has 640 million installs in the 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.
His comments touch on the companys plan to fight being broken up by regulators, especially if Elizabeth Warren becomes President.
He thinks Facebook would win, but on resorting to suing the government, he says does that still suck for us? Yeah.
Zuckerberg also describes how Facebook is working to launch a payments product in Mexico and elsewhere by years end as Libra deals with regulatory scrutiny.But beyond his comments on regulation, its his pigeonholing of TikTok thats most alarming.
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 destroy.Zuckebergs Thoughts On TikTokHeres what Zuckerberg said about TikTok during the internal Q-A sessions, (emphasis mine):So yeah.
I mean, TikTok is doing well.
One of the things thats especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies 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.
Its starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks.
Its growing really quickly in India.
I think its past Instagram now in India in terms of scale.
So yeah, its a very interesting phenomenon.And the way that we kind of think about it is: its married short-form, immersive video with browse.
So its almost like the Explore Tab that we have on Instagram, which is today primarily about feed posts and highlighting different feed posts.
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.
So we have a number of approaches that were going to take towards this, and we have a product called Lasso thats a standalone app that were working on, trying to get product-market fit in countries like Mexico, is I think one of the first initial ones.
Were trying to first see if we can get it to work in countries where TikTok is not already big before we go and compete with TikTok in countries where they are big.Were taking a number of approaches with Instagram, including making it so that Explore is more focused on stories, which is increasingly becoming the primary way that people consume content on Instagram, as well as a couple of other things there.
But yeah, I think that its not only one of the more interesting new phenomena and products that are growing.
But in terms of the geopolitical implications of what theyre doing, I think it is quite interesting.
I think we have time to learn and understand and get ahead of the trend.
It is growing, but theyre spending a huge amount of money promoting it.
What weve found is that their retention is actually not that strong after they stop advertising.
So the space is still fairly nascent, and theres time for us to kind of figure out what we want to do here.
But I think this is a real thing.
Its good.To Zuckerbergs credit, hes not dismissing the threat.
He knows TikTok is popular.
He knows its growing in key international markets Facebook and Instagram depend on to keep user counts rising.
And he knows his company needs to respond via its standalone clone Lasso and more.LassoBut while TikToks might look like Stories because theyre vertical videos, and TikTok might algorithmically recommend them to people like Instagram Explore, its a whole nother beast of a product and one that may be harder than it seems to copy.To crystallize why, lets rewind to Snapchat.
With the launch of Stories, it started to blow up with US teens.
Facebooks attempts to clone it in standalone apps like Poke and Slingshot never gained traction.
In fact, none of Facebooks standalone apps have succeeded unless they splintered off an already-popular piece of Facebook like chat and users were forced to download them like Messenger.
It wasnt until Zuckerberg stuck his clone of Stories front-and-center atop Instagram and Facebook that Snapchats user count went from growing 18% per quarter to shrinking.
There, Facebook used the same strategy laid out in Zuckerbergs comments push its good-enough clone in countries where the original isnt popular yet.But Facebook was fortunate because Stories really wasnt that dissimilar to the content users were already sharing on Instagram tiny biographical snippets of their lives.
Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel had originally invented Stories as a vision of Facebooks News Feed through the lens of an ephemeral camera.
All users had to know was I take the same videos, but shorter and sillier, posted more often, and then they disappear.
The concept of Instagram and Facebook didnt have to change.
They were still about telling friends what you were up to.
Choking off TikToks growth will be much more complicated.Why TikTok Is Tough To CloneTikTok isnt about you or what youre doing.
Its about entertaining your audience.
Its not spontaneous chronicling of your real life.
Its about inventing characters, dressing up as someone else, and acting out jokes.
Its not about privacy and friends, but strutting on the world stage.
And its not about originality the heart of Instagram.
TikTok is about remixing culture taking the audio from someone elses clip and reimagining the gag in a new context by layering it atop a 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.
Most videos on those apps arent designed to be templates for memes like TikToks are.
Insta and Facebooks social graphs are rooted in friendship and augmented by the beautiful and famous, but dont encompass the new wave of amateur performers TikTok elevates.
And since each post to the app becomes fodder for someone elses creativity, a competitor starting from scratch doesnt offer much to remix.That means a TikTok clone would have to be somewhat buried in Instagram or Facebook, rebuild a new social graph, and retrain users understanding of these apps purposeat the risk of distracting from their core use cases.
This leaves Facebook hoping to grow its standalone TikTok clone Lasso which TechCrunch scooped a year ago before it launched last November.
But as weve seen, Facebook struggles growing brand new apps, and that effort is further hindered by its increasingly toxic brand and sheen of uncoolness.
Nor does it help that Facebook must divert development resources to comply with all the new privacy and transparency obligations as part of its $5 billion FTC fine and settlement.The Next FeedFacebooks best bet is to assess the future value of the ads it could run on a successful TikTok clone and apply some greater fraction of that grand sum to competing directly.
Its already made some smart additions to Lasso like tutorials for how to remix and the option to add GIFs as sections of your video.
But its still failing to gain serious traction in the US.
While typical videos on the TikTok homepage where Im spending a few hours a week have hundreds of thousands of Likes, the top ones I saw in my Lasso feed today received 70 or fewer.TikTok trounces Facebooks Lasso in the US iOS App Store chartsI had Sensor Tower run some analysis comparing TikTok with Lasso since its launch last November, and found that Lasso gets 6 downloads for every 1000 for TikTok in the US.
Some more stats:US Total Downloads Since November: Lasso 250,000 // TikTok 41.3 millionUS Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso 760 // TikTok 126,000Average US Google Play Social App Chart Ranking: Lasso #155 // TikTok #2Beyond the US, Lasso has only launched in one other market, Mexico in April, where its been faring better but could hardly even be considered a competitor to TikTok.
Facebook needs to lean harder into Lasso:Mexico Total Downloads Since April: Lasso 175,000 // TikTok 3.3 millionMexico Downloads Per Day Since November: Lasso 1,000 // TikTok 19,000Zuckerberg may need to find a coherent place for TikTok style features inside Instagram and potentially Facebook.
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.
Its failure to offer IGTV stars monetization has led many to ignore that platform, and it cant afford that again.If Zuckerberg approaches TikTok as merely an algorithmic video recommender like Explore, Facebook will miss out on owning the social entertainment feed.
If he doesnt decisively move to challenge TikTok soon, its catalog of content to remix will grow insurmountable and it will own the whole concept of short form performative video.
Snapchats insistence on ephemerality makes it incompatible with remixing, and YouTube isnt nimble enough to reinvent itself.If no American 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.
If only Twitter hadnt killed Vine.