TikTok Ban

chubes

chubes

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From my fairly uninformed outsider viewpoint, we're watching a game of chicken. TikTok called the US's bluff by actually ceasing access, and Trump's goal is likely (as a dealmaker) to try to get them to sell the rights to operate it in the US to an American company. We'll see how long that dance goes back and forth.

I've read some funny takes that have gotten business people who understand not to talk about politics to finally reveal themselves, which is causing secondary backlash. Quite fun to watch. Everyone's arguing about free speech vs. national security, communism vs. capitalism, everyone's switching sides depending on how addicted they are to TikTok.

Imagine having your loyalty so deeply embedded to a Chinese app for watching clips of nonsense that you'll completely abandon your philosophical principles when it's threatened to be taken away. And not a lick of any of these arguments are likely touching on the true reason for the ban. It's a lobbying issue from TikTok's competitors and then blackmail-NGO's that I'll leave unnamed, but it's not hard to figure out.

The real question is, if the ban is upheld and China doesn't allow it's operation in the US, what happens to the traffic? I would guess that you immediately see small clones pop up like happens with Twitter over and over that fail, because they can't police their members. They'll position themselves on one side of the political aisle and either side will have problems with either harsh speech from angry people or illegal sexual material from degenerates. Rinse and repeat. The only one that is thriving, strangely, is Rumble. I'm not sure how the FTC and FCC allow the ads they run at 100% fill rate, with false medical claims and AI voices and all that.

The company that best positioned itself to benefit is YouTube with Shorts. But at the same time I don't feel like people like these "all you can be" dual purpose sites/apps. I could see Instagram Reels benefitting temporarily, but ultimately YouTube will win. The old Twitter company really screwed the pooch by buying Vine and then shutting it down. If I was Musk, I'd have been scrambling to get that relaunched, but it's too late. Vine was an entire decade ahead of everyone else.

The problem with YouTube Shorts has been that, while it seems everyone watches long-form and shorts, there's no actual crossover for specific channels. We all have our long-form channels we like, and our separate shorts channels, and never the twain shall meet. And YouTube didn't help when they were trying to pump shorts and ended up tanking long-form performance in the algorithm. Now they wait till you've watched a large number of shorts from a single creator before pushing their long-form videos on you. Before, they were doing it too soon and it was tanking CTR and watch time metrics so bad that the wisdom now is to have separate channels for shorts and longs if you plan on going hard on both.

Anyways, with no unforeseen variables arising, holding all else constant, and assuming the ban is upheld, I see a scattering into the wind of TikTok users and creators, ultimately to coalesce back into it's final form, and doing so on YouTube Shorts.

The driving factors?
  • Viewership availability
  • Superior analytics
  • Similar monetization
 
Trump helped reverse it and the access is back in the US. I just got full access back about 20 mins ago. Time to lock in!
 
Ryuzaki said:
there's no actual crossover for specific channels. We all have our long-form channels we like, and our separate shorts channels, and never the twain shall meet.
Click to expand...
Man, that's the truth. Channels will have 1.2 million subscribers built through shorts, drop a 6-minute video, and get 6k views after a month (see: Jake Krantz).

CCarter said:
Trump helped reverse it and the access is back in the US. I just got full access back about 20 mins ago. Time to lock in!
Click to expand...
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.go...ecutive-order-addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/

What a flip-flopper.
 
It gets me tickled to see people continue to act like anything on TikTok (or short-form video in general) is inherently garbage. Rest assured that when you see that line, it's accompanied by a number of other bad takes and bits of misinformation.
 
Jesse said:
inherently garbage
Click to expand...

They aren't adapting to the new reality. They think old school = more view time equals more money. It's a derivative from watch time on TVs. They aren't adapting to attention span being short. For the most part most are still doing 2,000 word count blog post as a main content - in 2025.

The new reality is affiliate marketing is happening on TikTok and encouraged. A lot of people have to shift their thinking - adapt or survive.
 
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