TikTok is not silly. It is a serious disrupter

“When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you,” wrote Eugene Wei, a tech blogger, in 2020, explaining the almost clairvoyant nature of TikTok. What the algorithm sees as it gazes into your columnist, a neophyte user, is anyone’s guess: a random feed delivers tips on how to design a ball gown, someone barking at a dog, Rod Stewary with a hankie on his head, and (phew!) Maya Angelou reciting “Phenomenal Woman”.

科技博主魏尤金（Eugene Wei）在2020年写道“当你凝视抖音时，抖音也在凝视你”，他解释了抖音洞察力的本质。你的专栏信息—新用户，在算法眼里是一个未知的猜测：一个随机消息提供了如何设计舞会礼服的提示，有人对着狗吠叫，头上戴着手杖，还有（哇！）玛雅·安吉洛（Maya Angelou）正在背诵“非凡的女人”等。

Schumpeter is quite clear, however, about what he sees in TikTok. It is not just the busty seductiveness of many of the clips that he cannot help noticing. It is the serious money changing hands. And the unmistakable thrill of creative destruction.

然而，熊彼特非常清楚他在TikTok上看到了什么。他无法忽略的的不仅仅是许多视频片段中丰满诱人的胸部。这是严肃的金钱交易，以及创造性破坏带来的明确刺激。

About time. Just five years after its birth, TikTok claims to have exceeded 1bn monthly users, despite a ban in India. On January 12th App Annie, a data gatherer, said TikTok caught up with Facebook in 2021 and overtook WhatsApp and Instagram in time users spent on it. Notwithstand-ing a judge’s decision on January 11th to allow America’s Federal Trade Commission to sue Meta, the socialmedia trio’s parent company, on antitrust grounds, TikTok’s success appears to mock the argument that Facebook is impregnable.

是时候了。仅在它诞生五年后，抖音声称尽管印度被禁止使用了，但每月用户量已经超过10亿。在1月12日，一个数据收集者App Annie说在2021年抖音的用户使用时间已经追上了脸书，WhatsApp和Ins。尽管在1月11日法官允许美国联邦贸易委员会以反垄断的理由起诉社交媒体三巨头的Meta，但是抖音的成功似乎在嘲笑脸书是坚不可摧的这一论点。

TikTok derives its magic from its algorithm and the data on which it is trained. Unlike Facebook’s rolling feed, TikTok’s simple, one-video interface means that the app always knows exactly what a user is watching. Clips are short, so viewers see a lot of them, generating plenty of information. This, combined with few friends and family clogging up the feed, allows the algorithm to match users with content creators that actually entertain them. And because videos are mostly shot on a smartphone, anyone can make them. Barriers to entry are low. Virality is high.

TikTok的魔力来自它的算法和被算法训练的数据。与Facebook的滚动订阅不同，TikTok的简单、单一视频界面意味着，该应用总是能确切地知道用户在看什么。视频很短，所以观众可以看到很多视频，接触大量的信息。不像Facebook, Tik Tok几乎没有向用户推送家人和朋友的更新状态，这使得算法能够将用户与真正让他们开心的内容创造者匹配起来。由于视频大多是用智能手机拍摄的，任何人都可以制作视频。进入门槛很低。因此Tik Tok在美国很快流行起来。

A big question remains.Can TikTok win business as well as it woos eyeballs? Its provenance has long suggested it can.It is born out of ByteDance,a privately held Chinese powerhouse that some think generated more than ＄40bn in revenues in 2021.Its sister app,Douyin,has thrived in China's hyper-competitive social-media market, which makes Silicon Valley look staid by comparison.That gives TikTok hands-on commercial experience to drew on.

一个大问题仍然存在。TikTok能在吸引眼球的同时赢得业务吗？它的起源早就表明它可以。它诞生于字节跳动，这是一家私人控股的中国大型企业，一些人认为字节跳动在2021年的收入超过400亿美元。它的姊妹应用程序“抖音”在中国竞争激烈的社交媒体市场上蓬勃发展，相比之下，硅谷显得死气沉沉。这给TikTok带来了可借鉴的实际商业经验。

So far its revenues, though growing fast, are reportedly low (it discloses no financial information). That is unsurprising. DonaldTrump’s abortive attempt in 2020 to ban it on national security grounds scared away advertisers. The ensuing drama—a thwarted sale, management upheaval and uncertainty over its relationship 。with ByteDance—caused yet more disarray. But these hurdles now appear to be behind it. In the absence of further geopolitical turmoil, TikTok could shake up the business model of social media in America, not just the user experience.

到目前为止，它的收入虽然增长迅速，但据报道却很少(它没有披露任何财务信息)。这并不令人吃惊。2020年，唐纳德·特朗普以国家安全为由试图禁止它，但失败了，吓跑了广告商。随后发生的戏剧性事件——受挫的出售、管理层变动以及双方关系的不确定性。字节跳动带来了更多的混乱。但这些障碍现在似乎已被克服。在没有进一步的地缘政治动荡的情况下，TikTok可能会撼动美国社交媒体的商业模式，而不仅仅是用户体验。

There are several ways it could do so. Start with advertising. Google and Facebook pioneered the pay-per-click approach. Tik-Tok is transforming it further, inviting brands to work with creators to make potentially viral content, such as skateboarders swigging Ocean Spray juice to the sound of Fleetwood Mac. Sometimes a brand's presence might only be visible via a hashtag.

有几种方法可以做到这一点。从广告开始。谷歌和Facebook率先采用点击付费方式。tiktok正在进一步改变它，邀请品牌与创作者合作，制作潜在病毒式传播的内容，比如滑板者伴着弗利特伍德麦克乐队(Fleetwood Mac)的音乐啜饮Ocean Spray果汁。有时，一个品牌的存在可能只能通过一个标签可见。

Second, e-commerce. Like other American social-media platforms, TikTok now enables viewers to buy goods directly by tapping a shopping tab on a video. It has teamed up with Shopify, an e-commerce platform, to bring more merchants to the site. So-called social commerce- including via live streaming- -is far bigger in China than in America. Jeremy Yang of Harvard Business School says TikTok may build on Douyin's experience in this field to bolster its online-shopping business.

其次是电子商务领域。和美国的其他社交媒体平台一样，TikTok使得浏览者可以通过点击视频里的购物标签直接购买商品，它已经与Shopify这个电子商务平台达成了合作关系，为网站带来了更多的商家。而所谓的社交电商-包含通过直播带来的收益-在中国规模的要远远大于美国。哈佛商学院的Jeremy Yang认为TikTok将会学习抖音在这个领域的经历来壮大美国的网购业务。

Third, the creator economy. It is not just that, according to Forbes magazine, TikTok’s seven highest-paid stars earned a total of $55.5m from work on and off the platform last year, triple the sum it counted in 2020. TikTok has also recently introduced ways for users to provide gifts and tips to favoured creators, boosting the incentive to produce fresh material and providing fees to TikTok. Such practices first took off in China.

第三，创作者经济。不仅如此，据《福布斯》杂志报道，去年TikTok收入最高的七位明星通过平台内外的工作收入共赚得5550万美元，是2020年统计总额的三倍。TikTok最近还推出了让用户向自己喜欢的创作者提供礼物和提示的方式，这增加了制作新鲜素材的动力，并为TikTok提供了费用。这种做法首先在中国兴起。

None of these innovations will amount to much if TikTok has another near death experience. That is why it appears to be put ting a final piece of its commercial strategy into place: balancing the demands of America and China. It has appointed Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean of Chinese ethnicity, as CEO. He is based in the city-state, which serves as neutral territory. He is comfortable on both sides of the Sino-American divide, having been educated in the West and served as chief financial officer of ByteDance and Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone-maker. It is still an open question whether he can—or even should—further disentangle TikTok from ByteDance to curb the perception that China could make nefarious use of TikTok’s data. To do so may help geopolitically. But cutting TikTok off from an army of Chinese software engineers could also jeopardize its mind-reading brilliance.

如果TikTok再次经历濒死体验，那么以上这些创新都不会有多大意义。这正是它要在商业战略做出最后调整的原因所在: 平衡中美两国的需求。该公司已任命新加坡华人Shou Zi Chew担任首席执行官。他生活在中立的城邦之国新加坡，他对产生分歧的中美双方都比较熟悉，因为他接受过西方教育，曾担任字节跳动和小米的首席财务官，后者是中国智能手机制造商。他是否能够或者甚至应该进一步将TikTok与其母公司字节跳动分离开来，以消除美国政府对可能恶意利用TikTok数据的怀疑，这仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。这样做可能会在地缘政治上有所帮助。但要让TikTok切断中国软件工程师们的算法，也可能危及它的思想阅读才华。

TikTok faces plenty of other challenges. It needs to invest heavily in content moderation to ensure toxic videos are removed before they go viral. Addiction is a palpable concern, not just as a meme—#tiktokaddict has more than 500m views. The app faces probes about data privacy, particularly of under­age users. Regulatory risk will rise as TikTok becomes more prominent.

TikTok还面临很多其他挑战。它需要在内容审核方面进行大量投资，以确保有毒视频在传播前被删除。上瘾是一个明显的问题，而不仅仅是作为一个话题--#tiktokaddict拥有超过5亿的浏览量。该应用程序面临着有关数据隐私的调查，尤其是未成年用户的数据。随着TikTok变得更加受欢迎，监管风险将上升。

One thing TikTok need not fear is being crushed by the big beasts of Silicon Valley (at least without help from Uncle Sam). Instagram has sought to mirror TikTok with “Reels”, and YouTube, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has introduced “Shorts” Neither has damaged TikTok’s popularity.

TikTok不需要担心的一件事是被硅谷的巨兽击垮(至少在没有山姆大叔帮助的情况下)。Instagram试图用“Reels”来模仿TikTok，谷歌母公司Alphabet旗下的YouTube则推出了“Shorts”。但这两项举措都没有损害TikTok的声望。