TikTok Platform and Application Walkthrough Essay

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…

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…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…