Creator Tools: TikTok’s Great Advantage
TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and whatever else those dang kids are up to these days
Welcome to the second issue of Entertainment + Tech. Each week will cover an interesting way technology & entertainment are colliding and where things might go from here. The goal is to serve as the starting point for a conversation: we need more people who stand in both the entertainment and tech worlds if we’re going to build great products & create great content.
For Whom the Tok Tiks
When people talk about what TikTok has done well, they tend to focus on ‘The Algorithm’, i.e., how TikTok recommends videos to users based on their behavior. It’s certainly a critical component of the platform–as I noted last week, when there’s so much stuff users could watch, you have to make sure they find what matters to them. That was true for Netflix, and it becomes even more important with the scale & quality of content available on TikTok.
I have a different take on TikTok’s greatest strength, though. I believe their biggest advantage comes from building super simple, yet powerful, video editing tools–so simple that every teenager with a smartphone could become a creator. [1] These tools gave TikTok a content advantage, both in quantity and in tailoring videos to the platform. It also gave them a user advantage by opening up a huge base of creators, especially bringing teens to the platform to express themselves.
So, let’s talk about tools.
Tools Make Things Easier
Tools, broadly, are technologies, processes, and techniques that make our sight more clear, our work more efficient, our creations more precise, etc. Basically, things that help us do something better.
One way to view the history of progress is as a history of tools. So many discoveries and improvements that seem obvious to us now were completely blocked until a new tool came along to make them possible. Microscopes changed what we could see & measure, which led to the discovery of bacteria, a huge leap in our understanding of the world–a new tool meant new science opened up. [2]
Tools can also make things feasible where they weren’t before. In a more relevant field, Walt Disney Studios’ invention of the multiplane camera made it possible for them to push the bounds of animation. Before, techniques like parallax, depth of field, and special effects like moving water were technically possible, but prohibitively expensive to create. [3] Now, with the multiplane, these effects could be produced much more quickly and cheaply. That reduction in cost made producing high quality, full-length animated feature films possible, and so came Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs–a new tool meant new art was possible.
In the case of TikTok & user generated content platforms, I’m going to be talking about digital creation tools and the ways they’ve enabled new creators & content.
Cost of Creation
Managing costs is a fundamental challenge in content production, whether these are monetary costs or time costs. Pretty much anything a video creator would want to make is technically possible, but basic economics would say it’s only worth it if the benefit they get back is higher than what they spend. [4] In a gross oversimplification, doing anything on screen has a cost, whether it’s in a movie or a YouTube video. If you want to do more, you either have to find a way to pay for it or find a way to make it cheaper. As with the multiplane camera, tools that make production easier mean new possibilities & more content. In TikTok’s case, their tools reduce the time & expertise required to create content, which has helped them drive content growth and access new creators.
YouTube vs. TikTok
For comparison’s sake, consider YouTube. For a long time, YouTube was the place for low production value video. They made it really easy to upload and share videos, so the cost of distribution dropped dramatically. Sharing a video of a cat or some quickly filmed joke became so easy that that kind of content proliferated. YouTube also invested heavily and successfully in content discovery. [5]
To make something look good on YouTube takes time, money, and/or expertise, though. High-quality video requires a decent camera. Editing has to be done on dedicated video editing tools; YouTube creators either need to have them and know how to use them, or pay someone else who does. YouTube was built before mobile became huge, so it was based on a desktop-first world where these constraints made sense. With a much lower bar to entry than traditional film/TV, creators still flourished on the platform, but the effort required did limit that class to based on who had the resources and determination to create. [6]
Just like YouTube, TikTok has great distribution and discovery. When it comes to creation, though, TikTok is a mobile-first product built in a new world. It’s designed to use video captured on the phone or pulled from the internet. TikTok’s editor is straightforward and built into the app. It makes it easy to sequence videos and add effects–some make videos look better and some are part of the content themselves. The editor is so easy to use that explaining how to use it in creative ways is a genre of TikTok videos. All of a sudden, creators who didn’t have the resources or will to create on YouTube had access to TikTok. A lot of these were teenagers who already spent a lot of time on their phone sharing content with their friends.
The TikTok Advantage
The effect is that TikTok opened up a space in a gap left by YouTube - even lower production value creative content that’s still enjoyable. [7] Creators can focus on shorter, goofier, less polished clips, because it’s way easier to produce them for TikTok than it would be for YouTube. They can focus more on the content itself, rather than laboring over how to make it presentable.
Two major advantages this creates for TikTok:
Users come to TikTok to create, driving growth. Creators are also more invested in the platform than non-creators, whether they’re influencers or just expressing themselves. They want to share what they create with others. They want to see what else is happening on the platform. More creators means more engaged users, and TikTok is great at encouraging creation. [8]
They have a massive amount of content available. Not everything is good, but not everything has to be, and in fact, what’s trash to one person may be great to another. The wide range of content means there’s more possibility of finding what a user likes, and the discovery algorithm sorts through the mess for them.
Instagram, one of TikTok’s fiercest competitors, used this same approach early on.
Before Instagram was the social influencer & influencer-wannabe machine it is today, it was a simple photo sharing app, and one of their biggest innovations was filters. Basic editing can have a huge effect on the quality of a picture. Rather than needing complicated editing tools on a computer, with a few taps on the phone, a picture taken by an amateur became decent enough to be shared with friends. Users could feel good about sharing their photos because Instagram made them look good, and photography was opened up to a new group of casual creators. [9]
Looking at TikTok & Instagram, a few principles stick out for tools for user generated content:
Simple - users don’t need to be experts to create and the controls are straightforward.
On-device - no need to upload to a computer, which reduces the time it takes to create and makes it easier to distribute.
Opinionated - they only allow users to make content in certain ways. Some of this is for simplicity’s sake, some is to make it easy for the user to look good. Another advantage is that in the early days of the product, this makes content recognizable enough to create a new style that signifies an Instagram photo or TikTok.
(Of course, for more professional creators, different principles will apply. Lots of big TikTok & Instagram influencers use (or pay someone to use) more robust editing software.) [10]
For a broad content platform, creator tools can help build a great moat. If you find a gap where people want to create but don’t have the ability to, giving them tools gives you access to them and their content. Of course, you have to actually design good tools, but I’ll leave that problem up to you.
P.S. In the last few days since I wrote this, TikTok has been effectively banned by executive order. There’s still a lot of wackiness left to play out around that, and I think a Microsoft acquisition is likely, but will be interesting to see what happens.
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[1] This does lead to a lot of low-quality video, which is why their discovery algorithm is important too–no piece of the product exists in isolation.
[2] In actuality, the first microscopes were too blurry, so their usefulness was limited. It was only through Leeuwenhoek’s improvements in lensmaking that it became possible for him to study the microscopic world and discover bacteria. Tools for lensmaking led to better tools for seeing.
[3] In earlier animation, each frame of character movement was on a separate sheet and placed over a static background to be captured on camera. To create these effects realistically would have required painstaking effort by hand. Slow + precise = higher cost.
[4] These rewards don’t have to be monetary. Incentives for creators will be a dive for another week.
[6] As time has gone on, in fact, the standard for YouTube videos has increased dramatically, to the point where a video from a major channel might now be a full production with lighting, sound, editors, etc.
[7] This gap was also widened further by the rising standards for YT I mentioned above.
[8] In late 2018, a survey found that 55% of active TikTok users had uploaded a video in the past month. That number has certainly gone down as the platform has grown, but that’s still strikingly high.
[9] Until Reels, Instagram had no video editing tools, though. Also, I haven’t played around with Reels yet, but I’m skeptical on how good a strategy it is even if TikTok goes away. Instagram copied Stories from Snapchat and did well, but Stories were more aligned with how users already used Instagram and fit into pretty much everyone’s use case. TikTok is a different kind of content–it’s unclear if Instagram can stand to be Instagram & TikTok at the same time. Seems like to Instagram, the potential growth in younger demographics is worth playing with their brand & content.
[10] Over time, this could shift standards and therefore the cost of production on these platforms higher as well, but as of now TikTok remains cheap and easy to produce for.
Thanks for reading the second issue of Entertainment + Tech. I’d love to hear your feedback and ideas. You can respond to this email or reach out to me on LinkedIn. If you know someone else who would enjoy this newsletter, please share it with them!