Social And Streaming
It's a whole new world of media dominance, with TikTok leading the pack, and broadcast falling way behind
The media landscape is changing rapidly. It’s different than when movies killed Vaudeville, or when radio took live music from theaters, or when television took drama and comedy from radio, or even when cable fragmented TV. Old media always gives up its content to new media. A recent Wall Street Journal article shows that streaming has supplanted cable, over-the-air television, and music radio. That’s right, Netflix, Disney+, et. al. are now bigger than their legacy competitors.
There’s been a raging argument through the years over whether content or distribution was king. Content folks say without great shows, a distribution network is worthless. Those who back the distribution side wonder what good a great show is if no one can see it.
Social media seems to have settled that one. Futurist and management consultant at Joint Communications, John Parikhal, who did post-graduate work under media guru, Marshall McLuhan, says it’s always been about the platform, or as he and McLuhan express it: “The medium is the message.”
And it appears now that by time-spent-viewing, social media is even bigger than streaming. The New York Times took a deep dive into the mysteries of TikTok: “Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.
“Today, its American user base spends an average of 82 minutes a day on the platform, three times more than on Snapchat or Twitter and twice as long as on Instagram or Facebook, according to a recent report from the app analytics firm Sensor Tower. TikTok is becoming increasingly important as a destination for political content, often produced by influencers.”
When searching online, adults default to Google and Amazon, but
TikTok is winning in the search business with teens and young adults.
Brian Pappas is a digital marketing executive at Moroch. He says, “TikTok's secret sauce is the accuracy in its algorithms predicting user interest. It's similar to the YouTube "rabbit hole," where you start watching a video, and TikTok will continue serving you videos based on your interests/browsing history. The content is almost always very short (<30 seconds), which is perfect for the younger generation's shrinking attention span.
“On top of that, it's much easier for users to generate a larger number of followers on TikTok. One of the simplest reasons people are naturally addicted to social media is the shots of dopamine they receive from seeing bigger numbers on their posts. It fills an (often narcissistic) innate desire to be cared about. There's a black market to buy bots to artificially inflate your own metrics to push your content's visibility, and that isn't just used by the platform's biggest content creators - it's used by normal people.
“All social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and TikTok seems to be the most addictive platform yet.
“That being said,” Pappas continued, “TikTok's security issues still scare me. TikTok was nearly banned in 2020 over fears that the Chinese government can fully access user data, and that fear was confirmed this year. Granted, Facebook and Google collecting your data isn't the greatest of alternatives, but they've at least gone through enough checks and balances, being based in the US, to ensure there is some level of security protecting your data from being leaked. Wells Fargo banned its employees from using TikTok due to those security concerns. An FCC Commissioner called for the app to be removed from stores.
“TikTok has been sued for breaking privacy laws, and was forced to add a paragraph to their terms of service stating that they were tracking your biometric data - fingerprints, faceprints, voiceprints, etc. My contacts at Google and Facebook have shared a lot of creepy behind-the-scenes information with me, but what TikTok is doing is on a completely different level.”
“I've considered the possibility that I'm blowing these concerns out of proportion, but the detrimental effect TikTok is having on our society is obvious. The larger question for us is, do we think the potential gains outweigh the risks? If TikTok continues growing at this rate and there ends up being no government intervention, it will become impossible to ignore. I think we should at least start talking about it.”
Streaming’s minute in the sun is being eclipsed by social media. Here's a little perspective: in 2021, audiences watched Netflix for 96 trillion minutes; TikTok viewers spent 22.6 trillion minutes on-platform.
The bottom line according to Pappas? “Proceed with caution.”
©2022 Jon Sinton