The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok

https://pudding.cool/2022/07/tiktok-story/

by noplsbecivil • 4 years ago

92 80 4 years ago

pudding.cool

langsoul-com• 4 years ago

The value of tiktok is that you don't need an existing audience to get views.

Using it to establish yourself is great, it's a means to an end, a marketing tool like the rest.

Avicebron• 4 years ago

Many of the most successful youtube/twitch streamers leverage a blow up on TikTok to garner an audience on a more lucrative platform.

psyc2• 4 years ago

In all of the TikTok praise threads we've had here, this is the first time I can remember ever seeing anybody mention what I personally believe is a killer distinguishing feature. TikTok's algo guarantees that every video will appear on at least N FYPs. Then if it performs well in that ad hoc 'test group' it will be show to a wider group, and so on.

atom-morgan• 4 years ago

There really is no better platform for exposure. Just over a week ago my TikTok had just under 1k followers. I'm currently at 5.2k.

Compare that to something like Twitter or Twitch. You can go for months, even years, without ever getting noticed.

zeroonetwothree• 4 years ago

I posted a math video and it only got 2 views. I’m probably terrible though.

fairity• 4 years ago

Ding ding ding, yes, TikTok surfaces better content because of the nature of its recommendation algo. One of Facebook’s top priorities is now following in their footsteps — moving away from social graph-driven recommendations to AI-driven recommendations. Just listen to their last earnings call.

unityByFreedom4• 4 years ago

Does TikTok just have reams of content selectors deciding if certain posts are good or not?

Otherwise I can't see how they could auto-decide to push out content to large audiences without something they don't like getting out.

Like, they'd only need to sift through a handful of videos to reward random publishers with thousands of views, perhaps even with fake numbers, and people would probably gobble it up.

Jensson• 4 years ago

Technically they could have thousands of content reviewers in China working fulltime rating videos based on emotions. With a minute a video, they'd each crunch through hundreds of videos a day, and language doesn't matter since you can feel emotion from any language. Add some basic algorithm to select videos to review (new creators and creators with a track record) and you'd get a "magical algorithm".

unityByFreedom4• 4 years ago

Thousands? How about millions. Facebook employed 15,000 content reviewers in 2020, plus probably ten times that volunteering to mod their own FB pages. I'd expect China's state owned western-facing social media site to have far more.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

I suppose I don't know about 'reams', but a concierge in London told me he'd taken a job there doing just that.

OJFord2• 4 years ago

And perhaps I should add I know they earn ~Grad SE salaries, and actually he was trying to segue into SE, (self-studying in down-time, good on him) so it was presumably not merely a 'living wage' (the new minimum) 'gig'.

wongarsu3• 4 years ago

TikTok's app is the result of designing an app around a recommendation algorithm (instead of adding recommendations to an app, as everyone else did). As a result you get great recommendations. I imagine that also really helps with moderation and censorship: Identify videos you want to restrict, check which cohort gets recommended those the most, then concentrate your moderation efforts on videos that the algorithm wants to recommend these people.

The recommendations and people's video interactions allow you to classify both people and videos.

solalf• 4 years ago

TikTok's app is the result of designing an app around a recommendation algorithm

First time I hear of TikTok in those terms. Could you expand on what that means?

psyc2• 4 years ago

Yes. The users. TikTok is unique (afaik) in that every new video is shown to a sample group of real users, and its performance evaluated. If it does well in that group, it's shown to a larger group. If it continues to do well, it's shown to a still larger group, etc.

throwaway2903• 4 years ago

You are forgetting TikTok mods tasked to shadowban from "For You" anybody they think is physically unattractive, poor, go political in livestreams, etc. (https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us...)

Don't have any illusions, they can easily control what goes viral if it matters to the mothership.

vonseel2• 4 years ago

I wonder how the app determines what users should see a video.

If someone post a clip playing guitar and singing for example, would it determine this is a performance, and it should show it to cohorts who have liked viewing performances in the past?

Or would the AI model work more like… show (unknown type) clip to random people, identify similarities in the people who like or dislike the video based on those user’s viewing habits and then try to identify the video type based on that knowledge? I guess the second method would be very inefficient unless combined with some feature extraction and metadata / tagging from the source.

Not an ML person, just a curious dev.

Ekaros• 4 years ago

So what are the numbers compared to other platforms? Honestly 12,5% doesn't sound too bad... How does that compare to let's say Spotify, Youtube and so on...

1123581321• 4 years ago

It’s saying 12.5% of popular bands on Spotify were boosted into it by Tiktok. The odds of becoming a successful artist are much smaller.

He has another project that found that 21 of seven thousand bands became big, and those 7k were bands that had actually managed to book and play a small show. https://pudding.cool/2017/01/making-it-big/

begueradj• 4 years ago

Joe Reviews TikTok's Crazy Terms of Service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtGwlQWqQWs&ab_channel=Power...

charleskinbote• 4 years ago

Undoubtedly very similar if not identical to what other social media platforms do. For all these apps, there should be explicit big banner opt-in prompts with a default of opt-out at the very least, e.g. "can we correlate you to other devices using your keystroke patterns?". I don't think the average person should be obligated to accept or reject terms of service wholesale but instead term by term; put the burden on the company, not the consumer. It would encourage smaller sets of terms and make the users more aware of what they're getting into.

mtrycz2• 4 years ago

Nah, just leave. And explain to everyone why they should leave.

helsinkiandrew• 4 years ago

A viral song in any format has usually never guaranteed continued similar success (How many PSY or Rebecca Black follow up records do people know?) - why would it be different on TikTok.

Often a viral hit will be due to a beat or quirky lyrics that aren't repeated in the rest of an artists music. Continued success needs a fanbase that's interested in a lot more of your music.

rvz2• 4 years ago

It is no different and it's the same old power law which the rewards and success diminishes as more creators and users are doing the same thing on the platform.

It's not about the one trick pony hit's that exist on a single platform which the article is focused on, it is indeed the continuation afterwards which a creator's following will still exist beyond TikTok or wherever their debut hit originated from.

Inevitably, The corporations, media and the existing larger influencers from other platforms will join in and ruin the platform, just like they did with the rest of the others. The over glorified algorithm has already been gamed by them to increase engagement, ads, etc such that smaller and late creators have depleting chances of being recognised.

Nothing has changed.

eckza• 4 years ago

All of this has happened before; and it will happen again.

Retr0id2• 4 years ago

Rebecca Black perhaps, but PSY is certainly not a 1-hit-wonder.

https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/officialpsy

120.75M (+5.8%) Video Views for the last 30 days

And that's just on YouTube. Sure, none of their followups received quite the same amount of attention, but they certainly have a healthy sustained audience.

asdajksah2123• 4 years ago

Psy was a well established artist in South Korea having won national awards for his musc well before Gangnam Style. He'd hardly qualify as a 1 hit wonder.

antihero• 4 years ago

She’s making a comeback in hyperpop with various collabs!

phreack• 4 years ago

Incidentally, I recently remembered about Rebecca Black and went looking to find out she did continue singing and now has a legit established pop career with tons of songs. I heard a few and became a big fan, they're pretty good if you like pop!

I guess it's a good idea to use a viral moment to gather those few fans who'll appreciate the art you'll like to make continuously.

pessimizer• 4 years ago

How many PSY or Rebecca Black follow up records do people know?

Rebecca Black had a viral video that people liked because of how bad the song was, and how badly it was performed. She not only didn't disappear, but parlayed being known for something terrible into a entire career.

Mikeb85• 4 years ago

How many PSY

PSY was successful before and after Gangnam Style... But he's a Korean artist and never meant to go global so of course his appeal might be limited beyond one funny video.

est31• 4 years ago

The best example is mentioned in the post: Lil Nas X. His song "Old Town Road" went viral thanks to TikTok, and "real" fame followed afterwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil_Nas_X#2018%E2%80%932019:_B...

Lil Nas X began creating memes to promote "Old Town Road" before it was picked up by short-form video social media TikTok users. [...] Lil Nas X estimated he made about 100 memes to promote it; the song went viral in early 2019 due to the #Yeehaw Challenge meme on TikTok. Millions of users posted videos of themselves dressed as a wrangler or cowgirl, with most #yeehaw videos using the song for their soundtrack; as of July 2019, they have been seen more than 67 million times. Another core audience tied to social media is children who are hidden in the statistics of adult listeners. Quartz.com says the song certainly owes part of its success to the demographic, and notes they are attracted to the song being repetitive, easy to sing along to, and using lyrics about riding horses and tractors, which children can relate to. It debuted at number 83 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, later climbing to number one. The track also debuted on the Hot Country Songs chart at number 19 and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs at number 36. After an "intense bidding war", Lil Nas X signed with Columbia Records in March 2019.

taylorius• 4 years ago

I worry that tiktok is such an all-or-nothing system, you have to turn into a "maximally viral" artist to stand a chance. The tiktok system itself warps what constitutes popular taste.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

It mostly is. Very unforgiving if you want to branch out to different types of content or even subjects. You become a person known for one thing that made you popular and it’s hard for most to break out of that unless they had an existing platform.

You either follow trends or make your own. Otherwise you’ll fall off quickly.

amelius• 4 years ago

Isn't the same true for, say, apps in an App Store?

Did anyone actually analyze what is happening there, i.e. how fair the system is or how much it is like a lottery?

dopeboy• 4 years ago

To be a self sustaining business, probably. For the hobbyist creators, there's a long tail of creators that don't need to go maximally viral and still enjoy a healthy following.

jer0me• 4 years ago

Box made a video in collaboration with The Pudding about this: https://youtu.be/S1m-KgEpoow

unsignednoop• 4 years ago

tangibly related: does anybody know how google and other search engines fair in indexing TikTok/Douyin?

I wonder if the inability to go viral relates to the difficultly of finding tiktok videos off-platform. Admittedly, every TT video I have ever seen has been sent to me via a share link.

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

So are users completely at the mercy of its recommendation algorithm - suddenly you appear at the feed of millions of people, if the system finds your content viral enough?

Or is there room for people to game the system? I.e. publish content, and pay click farms to make your stuff look legit?

rvz2• 4 years ago

So are users completely at the mercy of its recommendation algorithm

Yes they are.

It's the same old situation with YouTube's algorithm, where it dictates what gets seen or unseen on people's feeds and which tags get blacklisted or not and that is all done by TikTok. Once you change it, it can be controlled by a single entity for any reason. Since they have done this previously, angering a large section of its user base, they have the power to do it again.

Or is there room for people to game the system? I.e. publish content, and pay click farms to make your stuff look legit?

It already has been gamed, both by amateurs and professionally.

In the professional case, it's already happened with the large advertisers, existing influencers and companies that have started to jump onto the platform. They have done it through promotional and backroom corporate deals, since they have enough money, influence to make sure that their content is pushed to the largest amount of users regardless. Hence this, all these systems have been gamed by this old tactic, and that includes this over glorified recommendation algorithm.

This is how it will get ruined, and it is beyond the hype comments and boosters that you see here screaming about the number of views they have, reminding us of the basic near peak of the power law where the majority of the hype will deplete once the large companies, existing influencers, advertisers start aggressively pushing their posts, ads, etc for engagement farming and growth in another social network, that will appear regardless of TikTok's algorithm.

Rinse and repeat.

liberia2• 4 years ago

I’ve figured out a way to get loads of views on Facebook. The trick is to use their Groups feature. Join every group that has no less than 100,000 members then when sharing choose ‘Share to group’ and post to every group you joined. I’ve got silly little cat videos getting 1M views within a week of posting…

Part of going viral is luck too. If you’re lucky some high profile account will share your post, and the popularity soars.

ok123456• 4 years ago

That's literally just spam.

liberia2• 4 years ago

Well I make sure the post is on topic. So funny stuff goes to humor groups. Inspirational quotes go to all the wisdom/spirituality/philosophy groups. Even better if it’s your own material. I find reposts of other’s content a bit shallow and meaningless.

status200• 4 years ago

Tiktok will definitely be replaced by a similar app if they don't start paying out to their content creators in a similar way that Youtube (still awful, but better) does.

Hank Green has a great video[0] on the difference since he is on both platforms, and unless there is more compensation to the creators, they will get burned out chasing the high of the occasional viral video.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAZapFzpP64

vonseel2• 4 years ago

Possibly. But users aren’t likely to switch unless the content creators leave, and the content creators will stay if they have more views there than on Instagram / YouTube / etc. (actually, they probably just post the same videos to all the platforms, to maximize exposure at almost no cost).

People always say X network is going to go the way of MySpace, but when’s the last time that happened? I wouldn’t say any of FB, Twitter, Snap, Instagram have died off the way MySpace did. Certain age groups may have migrated to other platforms, but these networks are so ingrained and established that millions of people can leave and it doesn’t matter.

There’s still a huge population using all of the networks and unless a new app provides some new unique feature like Snapchat and TikTok did when people first started using them, I don’t see anything popping up to replace them.

Parmenidea• 4 years ago

Vine, Yik Yak, and Google+ off the top of my head went the way of MySpace.

sudosysgen3• 4 years ago

I am very doubtful of that. A large percentage of YouTube content creators are essentially ineligible for monetization in any meaningful way due to various demonetization algorithms, and thus sustain themselves outside of YouTube. I imagine the same can happen on TikTok.

txru• 4 years ago

Wow I absolutely love the styling on that page on mobile.

When you scroll past the "8 signs of successful musician" guide to the list of musicians, it pins the guide to the top of the screen so you can compare every musician. Really natural, should be everywhere.

livinglist• 4 years ago

Not very colorblind friendly though.

winternett• 4 years ago

TikTok operates in mystery and it's really a smoke screen for big industry music and advertisers. The trending sounds are hand picked behind the scenes, Kate Bush Running up the Hill, a song originally released in the 80s on EMI Records (A major label) trending now in 2022 is proof of the underlying influence that big business has on the platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Up_That_Hill

Many people think that TikTok's algorithm is showing them what they want to see, but in truth it's showing people what makes the platform the most money inserted into brief videos made by people who aren't getting paid for their work, who are also hand picked by platform moderators.

TikTok will collapse as quick as it is rising when, just like Facebook, users stop logging in and stop posting content.

Platforms don't create sub-category lists for content because that causes them do do more work, and it also causes them generally to not be able to advertise things across the entire platform and test ads on markets more effectively. The truth of these giant platforms is that they don't help undiscovered creators, they exist to capture money from the largest business entities, and they woo big business in with huge user bases that often involve huge volumes of non-engaged and bot followers.

These sites also limit users visibility regularly in favor of showing platform ads and content from more popular *sponsored accounts. They also run verification for popular accounts to create even more content bias that hurts unknown creators that can't qualify for verification, just to show they are an authentic creator.

It's easy to tell how a platform's vibrance declines when a user has tens of thousands of followers, but only a hand full of likes on each post. This is most apparent right now on Twitter (for example). Platforms often generate fake user accounts to mimic vibrance as well, this also creates buzz as people don't take the time out to investigate actual engagement on sites before they report on them being popular.

TikTok removed post dates from being displayed on content they play so that you can't tell as a viewer that new content posts are in decline as users discover that the hype isn't working for them and that ads and sponsored posts are increasing. The majority of these large content platforms are all beginning to converge into charging users for visibility by promoting ad buying, another sign that they are really in decline rather than growing. When ads are purchased, many of these sites steer the ad content to overseas audiences that have no interest in buying products and services advertised as they slowly lose the ability to accurately target individual users.

The platforms that become most popular now are well versed in creating false narratives on potential for creator success and in creating smoke and mirrors and untruthful motivation content to keep encouraging independent creators to prop them up, but behind the scenes, they're all devoid of integrity and authentic user experiences, while being full of hope and promises that they don't deliver based on being their business models alone.

I recommend saving time and having a far better online presence as a creator, business, or brand by building and cultivating your own web site. Social media is dysfunctional, very costly for minor success, and time consuming while only offering short-term durability and name recognition.

wizofaus2• 4 years ago

Apparently Tiktok allows videos of up to 10 minutes, which in theory would make it suitable as a music distribution platform, but how many videos over 3 or 4 minutes actually go viral?

dirtydirk• 4 years ago

People don’t have the attention span to watch anything over 30 seconds anymore

wizofaus2• 4 years ago

The average length of the 100 most popular TikToks is apparently 15 seconds, which should tell you something. Apparently the increase to 10 minutes max was only very recent (up from 3). Either way it's hard to see how a musician could become successful just by staying on TikTok.

The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok

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