The Big Beast TikTok
---摘自 New Scientist (11 March 2020)
TikTok's rise has been meteoric (迅速的). With more than 3 million people a day now downloading the app, its success is down to more than just luck.
meteoric: a. 流星的；疾速的
meteor: n. 流星
meteor shower 流星雨
be down to : 歸因於 = put down to = attribute to = due to ...
IT HAS rejuvenated (使年輕) the music industry and given birth to a new generation of celebrities, including the likes of Charli d’Amelio, a 15-year-old social media personality and dancer. More than 3 million people a day downloaded video app TikTok in January, according to tracking company Sensor Tower. Its rise to become one of the big beasts of social media has been remarkable, so how did TikTok do it?
The app, which people use to share short videos, often accompanied by clips of music, is a modern media phenomenon. The firm (指的是字節跳動) sponsored the BRIT awards for music in February, with chart-topping singer Lewis Capaldi as its poster boy. Actors including Will Smith, and music stars like Justin Bieber, also use it.
juvenile n. 少年；a. 少年的；
juvenile delinquency 青少年犯罪
The charts 每週排行榜
chart-topping singer 排行榜第一的歌手
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, based in Beijing, China, bought an advert to promote the app at American Football’s flagship Super Bowl game, and the Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India.
Some people say its success is down to its brief content. “TikTok separated themselves brilliantly from the rest, focused on the things they’re good at and reinvented short-form content when the rest of the world is turning to long form with companies like Netflix,” says Harry Hugo, co-founder of The Goat Agency, a marketing firm. Unlike everything else, the platform “allows you to be effortlessly (輕鬆的) famous in a very short amount of time”, says Hugo. It is also buoyed (加強；鼓勵) by the fact that the videos are no more than 60 seconds long, and usually more like 10 or 15, and presented in an endless scroll.
“People don’t have a very long attention span (長時間注意力) nowadays, so it’s appropriate the videos are short,” says Anna Bogomolova, who posts content including her dancing to popular songs and performing comedy skits(短劇). Bogomolova has 2.3 million followers on the app.
She initially posted on Musical.ly, an app that allowed users to lip-sync to their favourite songs, before it merged into TikTok in August 2018. The change was significant, she says: “Now because people are doing dances, comedy, acting or art, everyone else is encouraged to try different things as well.”
This gives it great appeal, says Rich Waterworth, general manager of TikTok in the UK. “What makes TikTok so popular is that the experience is different for everyone: there’s no one thing that defines it,” he says. “So much of what trends on TikTok has become the origin of cultural conversation in the mainstream (主流的文化交流). Our success lies in capturing moments in the lives of ordinary people, like the farmer at @caenhillcc in rural England, teaching people the ins and outs of agriculture, or self-trained comedian @ameliagething, whose popularity on TikTok landed her a professional career in broadcasting.”
Since the merger (合併) with Musical.ly, TikTok’s popularity has exploded. ByteDance doesn’t release figures (透露數據), but a leaked media kit for potential advertisers in December 2018 showed that the average user opened the app 121 times a week, and spent nearly 27 minutes a day in it. TikTok’s meteoric rise shows few signs of slowing.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com
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