TikTok appeared less than five years ago, but the app has already been downloaded more than 3 billion times. TikTok belongs to the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, which developed the project Douyin in 2016.
It was supposed to be a competitor to the then popular Musical.ly service, created to record lip-sync (lip-sync videos with lip movements synchronized to music). China has its own version of the project, and its users do not have access to the international TikTok. By the fourth quarter of 2021, the app had been downloaded more than 3 billion times. How to make an app like TikTok and what are the prospects for this idea? Let’s talk about it in order.
TikTok is not only downloaded more often than other apps — they also spend more time on it. 90% of users visit TikTok more than once a day. TikTok attracts users because the content it contains is fun and dynamic. The goal of the video is to grab viewers’ attention within the first seconds so that they stop scrolling through the video feed.
The success of the project has also been influenced by the fact that videos on TikTok are easy to create and edit thanks to a huge number of built-in tools. Hashtags and challenges motivate users to create content themselves. Against this background, many investors are interested in the possibility of an opportunity to make money. To do this, you can make an app that will use approximately the same principles as the original project.
TikTok is also popular because there are no barriers to the virality of video: any user’s video can become popular, regardless of the number of subscribers. This is possible thanks to a special algorithm.
How Do TikTok Algorithms Work?
How were so many content creators able to achieve success? The point is that the algorithm pushes the number of subscribers to the background. Also, a special role is not played by how successful the previous publications were. This means that a newcomer’s video has just as much chance of being recommended by other users as the content of popular bloggers.
But when recommending, the algorithm considers other factors: what posts the user likes and what he or she creates, what search terms the user enters, what country he or she lives in, and so on. User engagement metrics play a key role in ranking and promoting authors’ content.
TikTok closest competitors
Reels on Instagram
In 2019, users in the U.S. spent an average of 12.8 hours per month on TikTok and just 7.1 hours on Instagram. In 2020, those numbers were 21.5 hours versus 7.5 hours. To compete with TikTok and win back audiences, Instagram launched a similar format called Reels in 2020.
The platforms have different principles of operation: for example, Reels has a more complicated interface and limited functionality — it lacks some video editing functions. Also, TikTok attracts younger users. The recommendation algorithm varies as well.
Likee
Singapore’s leading global video platform, Likee, is one of TikTok’s biggest competitors. The apps were launched at the same time, but Likee is not as popular: it has 150 million monthly active users.
However, Likee is aimed at an audience of 10–20 year olds, so there are strict rules for violations of which the administrators send users to ban. The target audience of TikTok is people 15–25 years old. Likee competes with TikTok through various methods of monetizing the blog, such as getting money for watching videos or liking posts.
YouTube Shorts
In August 2020, TikTok overtook YouTube in the US for the first time regarding the amount of time users spent on the app in a month: 24 hours on TikTok versus 23 hours on YouTube. So Google decided to make an app with a similar principle. But as a result, they added a separate section to the original mobile version for the video hosting service.
TikTok and shorts are quite different from each other. For example, TikTok offers a huge library of filters, while Shorts only offers a basic brightness and tone editor. The “Private” option in Shorts lets you choose who can watch the video (a similar option in TikTok makes the video available only to the creator). Short videos can be set to “dislike”, which cannot be done with TikTok.
Your own TikTok analog as a business idea
What possible reason could there be to make an app that would be analogous to TikTok? Mankind is so well-established on the Internet that even today we can talk about the competitiveness and rapid growth of the segment of the economy called “e-commerce”, which simply did not exist even 15 years ago, and 10 years ago no one would have called social networks a business-at most, an exotic entertainment of Harvard students, which gave an unexpected profit.
TikTok is one of the most popular Internet projects. People don’t notice how their favorite cozy virtual space is being commercialized. They exchange videos, chat with friends, give each other gifts, and gradually start paying for more and more options.
But the main way the network owner earns income is, of course, through advertising. Many investors decide to make an app to get a new advertising platform that way. Blog postings, reviews, targeted promotional posts, or a modest native format are all much more effective for sales than physical advertising, which is becoming a thing of the past.
How much does it cost to make an app like TikTok?
On average, a project that will pay for itself will cost you and your investors a lot. It all depends on your objectives and capabilities. Such a resource pays for itself much faster than a similarly priced coffee shop startup. On the Internet, it is easier to scale, because traffic is growing very rapidly.
For this money, you get a functional site with modern technological capabilities, good graphics, applications, and the potential for rapid growth.
Make an app like TikTok: first steps
Now, to attract an audience, you need to look for new formats. Choose a specialized area that connects people by hobby, profession, etc. This could be a “profile TikTok”-there are many unrealized ideas.
Work out the target audience. This step is worth going through with a professional marketer. The business plan for the project will help you assess the prospects of the project and understand how much money and time it will take to develop and reach self-sufficiency. It is good if you have a team of like-minded professionals who are equally interested in the growth of the social network.
Not the least important is to find investors who will allow you to start at a higher level and, therefore, seriously increase your chances of success.
If you decide to make an app like TikTok, turn to developers who do not deal with standard websites but specifically with advanced, multi-level projects. It is very desirable that the contractor can organize not only implementing the concept but also a large-scale advertising campaign after the launch. Also, support and promotion in the future would not hurt.
Make an app: examples of making money on the TikTok analog
There can be many ways to monetize: premium accounts with extended capabilities; the placement of all possible types of advertising; the sale of additional features; commission for transactions within the resource.
What should a promising product look like?
Decided to make an app? International projects with the potential to enter the global online market should have a lot of distinguishing characteristics:
- Multilingualism. The platform should support more than 40 world languages. The translation of all types of content should be done automatically.
- Artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will act as a business assistant, content moderator, translator, personal interlocutor, news aggregator, and “smart feed” creator of publications, which will significantly increase user loyalty.
- Built-in payment system with a transaction arbitrage feature, the ability to keep funds on balance and conduct transactions in virtual or local currency.
- A distributed system allows for easy customization and scalability to any task and any number of users; the system of server nodes supports millions of transactions and enormous content volumes.
- High level of protection. Pay special attention to this important aspect so that any attempted hacker attack is instantly blocked and the provider is notified accordingly.
- The service must actively develop to please users from all over the world. Such a resource has huge potential for development.
To bring bold ideas to life, it is important to sincerely believe in the promise of digital startups and actively invest resources in such projects. But keep in mind that if you create an ordinary copy of TikTok, it is unlikely that you will be able to outshine the world hegemon with your projects.
