#116: Hello Hollywood
In order to conquer TikTok your new content should be tiktokable
Hello again.
You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. I am an Internet researcher at HAW Hamburg, investigating TikTok. I really enjoyed this New Yorker story on Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art. It introduces the term “infinite media” which pretty much sums up the current feeling amidst a noisy information disorder with endless feeds of ever more.
Today we talk about:
🎥 TikTok Is the New TV – Not yet
⚡Hijacking #Pride
🥏 La More
🎥 TikTok Is the New TV – Not yet
TikTok is the new TV a Wired headline proclaimed a couple of days ago. But is it really? If TV means zapping relentlessly on a worn out remote control while sprawling on a sofa in a parents living room right after school sipping cold Orange Juice then maybe yes. But is TikTok the next frontier for Hollywood?
The numbers are out there. The social video app’s popularity has exploded over the past few years, now standing just behind Netflix in terms of average minutes spent per day by U.S. adults. And usage trends suggest social video consumption, particularly on TikTok, is approaching parity with traditional video entertainment (TV shows and movies) consumed on SVOD or FAST services (Variety).
And TikTok users out there are ready for longer videos. They now spend 50% of their time watching videos longer than 1 minute, according to a presentation given to creators last month (The Information). In 2022, Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, increased its maximum video upload limit to 30 minutes per clip. TikTok is now piloting 15-minute video upload limits for select users (Search Engine Land).
Users have started watching full tv shows (cut up in TikTok-size bites and pieces) and (mostly pirated) movies on TikTok (Variety) but new attempts to produce fictional content directly for TikTok are not yet very successful.
Adam McKay, with his non-profit production company Yellow Dot Studios, has set to be the first traditional Hollywood producer to invest real money into a scripted series on TikTok (Variety). Written and directed by Ari Cagan, “Cobell Energy” (TikTok) a satirical office comedy about a family-owned oil company has started with a first of 15-episode on Nov. 14. The numbers are not very promising devastating after two weeks: the account has 834 Followers 3327. That is because it does not feel at all tiktokable. The hooks are way too long. And the entire thing feels like television while it should feel like TikTok to actually work on the platform for now.
Maybe Hollywood producers should get their heads around the Queer Medieval Fever Dream Greedy Peasant (297.7K Followers 8.3M Likes). It feels way more organic and is way more fun. It feels like TikTok. And not like a black box of plastic. Thanks for recommeding it to me Nicki.
⚡⚡Hijacking #Pride
The hashtag as it is currently used across platforms was first proposed on Twitter by former Google developer Chris Messina in 2007. Ever since hashtag activism has been a thing where a large numbers of posts are using a common hashtagged phrase with a social or political claim like #Pride, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo or others.
I am mentioning this because hashtags are used less and less on TikTok – data that colleagues from Stiftung Neue Verantwortung have scraped indicate that. Nonetheless hashtag centered debates are still a thing. And hijacking them is a thing too. Together with stellar colleagues from University Münster i have done some research on how right-wing actors in Germany tried to piggyback on the pride-movement to spread patriotic and anti-queer narratives on TikTok utilizing the hashtag Stolzmonat - a direct german translation of queer month not normally used by the German queer community. All people involved in the research: Svenja Boberg, Saïd Unger, Marcus Bösch, Johanna Klapproth, Christian Stöcker, Thorsten Quandt.
We managed to identify several clusters of users involved. Besides an AfD cluster (the German right wing party helped to start the whole thing), we found far-right and outright neo-nazi accounts, an anti-government cluster (anti-covid and anti-semitic), a non german-cluster and a reach optimization cluster including pro-Russian propaganda accounts and an LGBTQI+ cluster trying to hijack the hijacker. We did not find any political party accounts in support of the attempt to hijack the hijacker.
The research is part of a broader approach of mine to better understand the far-right on TikTok especially the usage of memes and sounds. If you are up for something similar i am happy to discuss.
🥏 La More
💿 TikTok owner ByteDance axes hundreds of jobs in gaming unit as it scales back ambition (CNBC) and has followed others in increasing exploration of generative AI (Nikkei Asia)
💿 Will Livestreaming Be TikTok’s Amazon-Killer? (WSJ)
💿 Decoding Uncanny Valley make-up, Tikok’s creepiest beauty trend (Dazed)
💿 I learned the term “vibecession” and got to know Kyla Scanlon, a content creator focused on economic issues who posts carefully researched explainers across TikTok, Instagram and X via this article (New York Times)
💿 Is it TikTok? Here’s why some young Americans sympathize with Palestinians (NBC News)
💿 If you want to see a massive amount of disinformation concerning Israel/Hamas on TikTok being debunked i recommend Olga Robinson (Assistant Editor at BBC Verify and @BBCMonitoring covering disinformation, verification and misleading media narratives) on x these days.
💿 You have heard this one before: TikTok trumps Google as a search engine, research finds And this one too: People Get Their News from TikTok. This Doesn’t Mean We’re Screwed
💿 ‘Get Ready with Me’ videos take over TikTok with over 150 billion views but I haven't got a stitch to wear (Fortune)
I guess that’s it for now. If you want me to cover anything special, have questions or just want to send weird TikToks or say “Hi” please do.