TikTok Platform and Application Walkthrough

Platform or app walkthrough – TikTok
Introduction
Social media has significantly transformed human interaction, and this is mainly due to the continuous innovations and applications that are being integrated into its ecosystem. One of such applications is the famous TikTok app. Developed and launched by ByteDance, a Beijing based company, TikTok offers its users a platform for creating and sharing lip-sync videos, short music, and looping videos, among others. Emerging in 2018 as the first most-downloaded Chinese app in the United States, TikTok has an approximate global userbase of over a billion people. In the context of its economic and infrastructural status and significance, TikTok is explored in this paper as regards its ownership, revenue (and source of the revenue), and market attributes.
Discussion
According to the platform concept proposed by Poell et al. (3), TikTok is a multi-sided market platform. This is because it efficiently connects the end-users, content creators, and advertisers within its ecosystem (Tiwana 61). Through advanced leveraging of artificial intelligence, the platform has created a personalization for all its users. The end-users get recommendations based on their view history and the complementors, i.e., content creators and advertisers get information on the latest trends for targeting their content. This system of the network works efficiently because each set of the user affects the satisfaction of the other. In considering the TikTok’s platformization, the following perspectives are considered: Business studies, software/platform studies, political economy, and cultural studies (Nieborg, David, and Anne Helmond 4276). In terms of the business perspective, TikTok generated about $179.6 million in 2019 alone. Even though the revenue generation model is not adequately concluded, TikTok mostly generates its income from In-app purchases, advertisement options, and crowdfunding. As regards revenue generation for its complementors, especially the content creators, TikTok does not offer a direct approach to monetization. Instead, such influential creators refer their TikTok followers to their already monetized digital platform, e.g., YouTube channels. While this is not a significant limitation, a better approach to ensuring the loyalty of complementors would be to integrate a monetization option. This allows the content creators to have value for their creativity, and the increasing content keeps the primary users engaged. Viewing TikTok from a political perspective, its potential for reaching a broad audience with personalized campaign ads is quite evident. A few users have also been using the platform to create short videos to voice out their political views and promote political agendas.
A similar example can be seen in the case of Facebook’s alleged influence on the last American election via Russian interference. Considering the advanced personalization and predictive capacity of TikTok’s algorithms, its political significance cannot be over-emphasized and may require regulation. Finally, in terms of cultural practices and significance, TikTok provides an avenue for content creators across the world to showcase their culture and aesthetics. While this has the significance of promoting cultural appreciation, enlightenment, and tourist attraction, the censorship activities that apply to TikTok’s content is limiting. A few countries have issues with TikTok based on religious views and cultural proliferation. For example, India banned TikTok in 2019 based on “inappropriateness of content,” the rationale for the ban is that the app had the potential of introducing poor morals and values into the youths. Also, some users have raised concerns over TikTok’s censorship of content that presents China in a bad light. While it may be easy to attribute this censorship activity to the prerogative of TikTok as a Chinese company, the censorship of such content presents a bias—especially when it conflicts with the expressive needs of another set of users. However, since the idea of cultural appropriateness is mostly subjective, a video creation platform like TikTok can hardly control the extent of a backlash from such communities, except through the implementation of country-specific censorships into their platform.
TikTok: infrastructure or not?
Poell et al. (4) introduces a platformization as a way through which platforms can translate into infrastructures via the provision of APIs and SDKs to third-party developers. As seen in the case of TikTok, a few SDKs and APIs are made available to allow third-party developers to share their content with TikTok and leverage the capacity/popularity of the platform (Nieborg, David B., and Thomas Poell 203). A few of these TikTok SDKs include the Python, NodeJs, Ios, and Android SDKs, and these SDKs feature under the “TikTok for developers.” While it might also be more likely to consider the Chinese version of the app (Duoyin) as the primary infrastructure upon which TikTok itself is built, both apps are generally considered cultural versions of the same idea; however, separate entities. Following the recent launch of Resso: a music streaming platform launched in India by ByteDance, the transformation of TikTok into a more extensive infrastructure becomes evident.
The streaming app features most of the elements from TikTok, and its social-oriented features suggest a likely integration/dependence on TikTok’s currently advanced social matching and prediction algorithm. In terms of the significant attributes of a platform infrastructure, TikTok has a history of programmability and adjustments to meeting end-users and complementor needs (Plantin et al. 298). This is also being expanded through their gateway options via APIs and SDKs for merging with 3rd-party developers. Finally, the current version of the TikTok app is all over the world. This makes it ubiquitous, with access to various niches and backgrounds of customers.
Conclusion
The popular TikTok app, while seemingly streamlined in its functionality now, has been considered as an expanding platform and platform-infrastructure. Due to its current revenue capacity and potential for further monetization of its extensive database, the app is considered significant in the technological market. It also wields infrastructural power over its third-party developers and can have a significant economic impact based on the types of content its complementors are permitted to promote.
Works-Cited List
Nieborg, David B., and Thomas Poell. "The platformization of cultural production: Theorizing the contingent cultural commodity." New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 11, 2018, pp. 4275-4292.
Nieborg, David B., and Anne Helmond. "The political economy of Facebook’s platformization in the mobile ecosystem: Facebook Messenger as a platform instance." Media, Culture & Society, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 196-218.
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, et al. "Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook." New Media & Society, vol. 20, no. 1, 2016, pp. 293-310.
Poell, Thomas and David Nieborg and José van Dijck. "Platformisation". Internet Policy Review 8.4 (2019). Web. 7 Mar. 2020.
Tiwana, Amrit. "The Value Proposition of Platforms." Platform Ecosystems, 2014, pp. 61-69.