- TikTok is becoming bigger than Facebook and Instagram.
- Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, says TikTok has one key advantage over other social media apps: its content.
- A recommendation engine fills the app's front page with videos it thinks the user will like, rather than only videos made by people and pages that the user already follows.
- "It curates things in such a way that everything you see generally makes you happy," Chan told Business Insider.
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It seems there's no stopping TikTok.
TikTok has been downloaded 1.5 billion times, putting it ahead of Facebook and Instagram's downloads this year, according to data from analytics site Sensor Tower. The short-form video app has exploded in popularity with the younger Generation Z, a demographic that Facebook is eager to capture. Connie Chan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, believes TikTok has one key advantage over its competition: an ever-growing library of delightful content.
"It curates things in such a way that everything you see generally makes you happy," Chan told Business Insider. As a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for eight years, Chan has had a front-row seat for the rise of social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, which all raised funding from the Menlo Park, California, firm.
Chan, who's focused on investing in startups building products for mobile, real estate, and e-commerce, suggests that part of the reason for TikTok's success is that the app is designed to inspire happiness. It's set apart from other social media apps because it relies on algorithms to choose videos for the app's front page - which greets the user as soon as they open the app - instead of showing content only from friends, celebrities, and pages that the user follows. The app pulls from a wider variety of videos to hold a user's attention, Chan said.
She named three reasons for what she calls TikTok's "content advantage" over its competitors: a lack of a language barrier, a drove of evergreen videos, and the relative ease of creating viral videos.
Feeding the algorithms
The contents of TikTok's front page, known as the "For You" page, are spit out by a recommendation engine that fills the user's feed with videos based on what they like and whom they follow. A lot of the videos are made by people the user doesn't already follow. They might be from another country or speak a different language. (Users in India account for about a third of the app's downloads.) It doesn't matter, according to Chan, because the creator will often mouth the words over a recorded track. She said there is no language barrier.
Popular videos on TikTok tend to be less timely than the engagement news, gender reveals, and job changes that circulate Facebook on an endless loop. They may appear on the front page - which doesn't show time stamps for videos - months or even years after publishing, because the content is still relevant to the user's interests, according to Chan. By comparison, an Instagram post disappears from the feed in a few days.
"They can show you something from two years ago, and you wouldn't know and you wouldn't care," Chan said.
The app also makes it easy to produce viral videos, one of the reasons for its so-called content advantage. TikTok has a culture of memes and challenges. One user posts a video that has a funny voiceover. It goes viral and inspires thousands of other users to make their own videos using the same voiceover. Replicating a video doesn't require "as much creativity or brainpower" as coming up with a new idea, Chan said.
"You're going to see a hundred variations of the same exact dance or the same exact hand gesture," Chan said. "That really lowers the bar for people to create something that's going to get a lot of views."
