So I've been spending some time on mainstream social media lately.
In recent weeks, I started viewing videos in Tiktok which I find to be really entertaining. Although I feel that it's a complete waste of my time watching them, I still feel moved towards it. It's really obvious that the app has a way to feed me with videos that I enjoy. It's as if it knows what are the things that will keep me motivated to watch and continuously use the app. It's a scary thought.
The algorithm that made the app is learning a lot about me in real-time.
It's evident in the way the videos are flowing through the #foryou tab.
For example, whenever I watched a video of a cat from the start until the end of the video then the app will feed me with more cat videos on my #foryou tab. And then if I watch more of those cat videos then it will feed me with more of those kinds of videos more frequently.
It's not a wonder why Tiktok is one of the most downloaded apps in 2020 and it still keeps on rising in the coming years. One reason why I said that is the fact that they started paying users that are categorized as social influencers or "creators". The company behind the app has allotted a good amount of money to what they call Creator Funds.
The Creator Fund started with a total amount of $200M to be distributed to users that are over 18 years of age. For as long as the user has 10k followers and a total of 10k views in the past 30 days then that user will be eligible for the pay. In further research, I learned that one of the famous Tiktok users has earned a total of $4M in a year.
Out of 800M Tiktok users; one of them has access to 2% of the total fund. It sounds awesome and alarming as well.
Obviously, there's a huge gap in rewards distribution over in that platform. I made it sound bad but the implementation of it is not inferior at all. In order for a user to acquire this much money out of the system, the user must be really famous with a huge following that will really like the videos posted. The user that earns $4M in a year has 77M followers, that's a tough number to crack.
Essentially, it will take a huge crowd to make it happen and it's a legitimate number.
That made me searched how many registered users that Steemit has; a total of 1,238,717 users. Although I'm not sure whether this info is updated, however, it's obviously an inferior number compared to what Tiktok has. Both of these social media platforms started at the same time way back in 2016.
For that, I realize that the fuel that powers the Tiktok app to reach its success are the users. It's something that any of the social blockchains (Blurt, Hive, & Steemit) haven't touched on yet. It remains a mystery why none of these chains haven't replicated the secret sauce yet. Despite all of the really good features that are being offered to the masses.
The aggressive marketing campaign and intelligent algorithm of Tiktok app have clearly dominated the social space.
And I believe that in order for the social blockchains to garner a portion of the masses a big leap has to be made in terms of development. Also, we need to bring the product closer to the consumers and give them a good reason to accept it.
Nothing beats a great product.