The shot is fixed, from below. In the foreground there are the hands and the sandwich, which an expert butcher prepares on the basis of the client’s requests. “With crumb or without?” He asks before startingthen proceeds to cut cold cuts, cold cuts, cheeses, grilled vegetables: everything that can be found in any delicatessen.
Imagine this same scene, repeated on a daily basis, several times a day. Each video has thousands of views, some even millions. Because on TikTok success comes like this, fast, without forecastswithout even a precise reason.
The witness
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Videos and success on TikTok
Donato De Caprio is a butcher, he works in a shop called “ai Monti Lattari”, in the Pignasecca district of Naples. One day he has an idea: try to tell his daily work on TikTok, using an apparently very simple format. He resumes himself making sandwiches of all kinds, nothing more. The first videos come to a relatively small number of people, but it soon becomes clear that the format works: at the beginning of June it reaches 200 thousand followers, which become 600,000 at the end of the month. Today there are 1.7 million and they are growing every day.
What happened to De Caprio is extremely useful for understanding how celebrity works on TikTok. De Caprio finds a recognizable format, which immediately generates one familiarity with the context and the scenario: more or less everyone has happened to be at a delicatessen counter to get a sandwich made. On the one hand, the context is familiar; on the other hand, it is unpredictable enough to keep you watching: what will you prepare today? How much will the sandwich cost? The rest is done by the algorithm that, once the success of that kind of video has been identified, exponentially multiplies its distribution, allowing it to reach an extremely high number of people.
Never underestimate the consequences of TikTok
The story, so far quite linear in its peculiarity, at a certain point has a twist: last July 23, in a video on TikTok, De Caprio communicated to the followers that the company he works for asked him not to realize more content within the venue. A choice, it seems, dictated by confusion that the success of the videos caused in the shop and in the neighborhood, with very long lines even for regulars. In other words, that fast digital success, that million people attracted and engaged within TikTok, had had consequences. difficult to manage in the real world. Consequences that the company was probably not prepared to face.
De Caprio’s communication also has consequences: on Facebook, the company “ai Monti Lattari” is targeted by negative comments, to the sound of “Give us back Donato” and “Free Donato”. People struggle to understand a seemingly unjustified choice. Indeed, an entrepreneur named Steven Basalari (also very active on TikTok) proposes to De Caprio to open a new delicatessen together; offer for the moment rejected by the person concerned.
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The follower factory
Donato De Caprio’s is just one of them success stories born on TikTok, a platform that has actually started a new generation of influencers. Which are different from those that preceded them: on the ByteDance social network there is no need for large construction or recognized genres, such as gaming or fashion. All you need is to find an idea, locate a niche and leave that the algorithm (which works like this) does the rest.
According to an article appeared on The InformationTikTok is a “million-follower factory”, which can make anyone famous. Looking at the data it is hard to blame the newspaper directed by Jessica E. Lessin: second Social Blade, currently over 39 thousand accounts on TikTok have a follower count of at least 6 zeros. An impressive figure for a platform that is still young after all: on YouTube the profiles with over a million followers are 32 thousand, on Instagram there are 23 thousand.
The size of these single, often unforeseen successes can have consequences, as in the case of De Caprio. In Nepal, Local authorities have banned the recording of TikTok videos in some of the country’s most important tourist and religious sites: this is the case of the Buddhist temples of Lumbini, whose dedicated hashtag has 129 million views on the platform, against only 60 of our Colosseum. In the place, sacred to believers, it was more and more frequent to find people busy shooting content for TikToklooking for an effective trend to join the club of one million followers.