TikTok has now widely exceeded one billion users in the world and is perhaps the only social network that has been growing for the past 3 years. Again: in our country alone there are 20 million monthly active users, that is practically one in 3 people uses the platform.
I am notable numbers and understandably worrying for the competition, which in fact has repeatedly tried to counter this excessive power, with Instagram who started pushing videos more (enraging everyone) and YouTube who created Shorts, which actually seems like a copy of TikTok and is, among other things, the only platform that can keep up with it. He is also part of the worried group Google (more and more young they do research starting from TikTok) and could soon be added too Amazonwhich it already had last year tried to catch TikTok off guard.
Interview History of New Martina, record-breaking TikToker thanks to iPhone films. And to the courage of Emanuele Capone November 23, 2023
From 5 to 20 billion dollars in a year
It’s no mystery that the app, which belongs to the Chinese multinational ByteDancewants to broaden its field of action to shopping, also to better monetize the mass of users who spend hours every day scrolling through video after video: they have been tests carried out in various countries around the world (in Indonesia, for example) and above all last September the ecommerce section was opened in the United States, where TikTok users number around 150 million.
Il operation it’s simple: you watch a video, or even a live broadcast, in which a creator talks about a product, there is a link that takes you to the site (or to a minisite hosted within the app itself) where you can get more information on that product. product and you can buy it, you click, you buy it, you go back to TikTok. And the tour starts again.
In this way, as reported by the Wall Street JournalTikTok would like to increase the value of goods sold on the platform from around $5 billion in 2022 to at least 20 billion dollars over the course of a year (the data refers to the world market).
The business model is the one that works very well in China: the so-called livestreaming ecommerce, carried forward by platforms such as Douyin (which is the Chinese version of TikTok), Kuaishou and in some ways also WeChat, is holding up and growing despite the general slowdown in consumption. According to Goldman Sachs, the value of the goods that will be sold thus will grow in China by 18% per year over the next two yearscompared to +11% for ecommerce in general and will represent a quarter of the entire online shopping market in 2025.
Stazione Futuro The irresistible rise of Temu, the TikTok of shopping by Riccardo Luna 16 November 2023
Will the news also arrive in Europe?
We asked TikTok Italia for information on the possibility that this possibility also arrives for users in the European Union and we will update this page when we have answers, but it is obvious that in the West there are more complications, starting with the necessary profiling of buyers and the use of their data.
TikTok is already working in this direction, with the opening of data centers on European territory in which to store and manage the data of European users (is what the company calls Project Clover), but the question remains open and politicians will probably want to have their say: precisely in Indonesia, perhaps also given the success of the initiative, last September the government banned e-commerce done through social networks. Which forced TikTok to suspend this type of operation in the country.
And it is known that the United States, evidently also for issues of geopolitics and areas of influence, they do not look favorably on the space that the platform is conquering on their territory (and to the detriment of American companies). And certainly the opening of a section dedicated to ecommerce will not help to resolve tensions.
@capoema