Adopts from YouTube playbook, bets on user-generated content to grab advertisers’ attention.
TikTok, the short-video app owned by China’s ByteDance,
is trying to grow and
diversify its content creator base in India as a part
of its monetization strategy.
While TikTok’s primary identity continues to be of an application for creating, sharing and discovering
short music videos — a kind of karaoke for the digital age
— it’s currently making an attempt to evolve.
And, TikTok is hoping that advertisers will notice and bring in more business.
On Sunday, TikTok launched a campaign,
#MyTikTokStory, on the platform to encourage more Indians to
make 15-second videos on cooking, do-it-yourself,
sports, pottery, dancing and
singing. The campaign followed a ‘Creators Lab’ event it arranged for more than 500 people in Mumbai on Friday. The social media company is
hoping that diverse
content will attract more advertisers to the platform.
“We are very clear that creators are an enormous backbone. We believe that we
have to invest in this creative community,” Sachin Sharma, head of ad sales at
ByteDance India, told ET.
“They are a vital element to the business. Without them there’s no TikTok. We are committed to diversify content. It’s not just for brands, however we are hopeful brands will take notice of
that.”
TikTok isn’t the first platform
to up the user-generated content game to draw in advertisers. In 2011, YouTube wanted to attract more premium
advertisers and raise the standard of its programming.
To do that, it introduced grants for creators, opened creator hubs, studios and
even acquired a company that helped creators
go viral. In the next 5 years, efforts paid off and
YouTube and creators earned millions.
TikTok claims to have 200 million
users in India, of which 120 million are active monthly. Its monetization efforts
picked up pace once an interim ban on the app’s
downloads was lifted by
the Madras high court in April. Premier brands like Pepsi, Snapdeal, Myntra,
Shaadi.com and Shopclues have lined up to advertise.
The app’s India user base is primarily teens residing in small towns. It overtook Facebook as the most downloaded social networking application
globally in the first quarter of 2019. “There
is research which says peer-generated content
is stickier, relatable
compared to just brand-generated
content. Lot of
leading brands and marketers recognize that fact. Plenty of
interest we are seeing
is because brands understand a user’s imagination of what the brand stands for is as relevant as
brands’ own narrative,” Sharma said.
Sharma cited the example of Pepsi’s #SwagStepChallenge on TikTok which was kicked off with a few celebrities beginning of a dance challenge on
the platform in May. The
promotional videos resulted in TikTok users making thousands of their own #SwagStepChallenge dancing videos, leading to 8.6 billion views.
The campaign spilled over to Instagram and
YouTube later. “There is a lot of talent in India that needs to be known. We are aiming to try more engagement with the video format, we are going to reach out to users to express themselves,”
Sharma said.