Meta, Snapchat see TikTok reigning social media in future

As more and more people, especially the millennials and Generation Z, watch videos on social media, both Meta (now formerly Facebook) and Snapchat have indicated that the future of social media looks more like Chinese short-video making app TikTok.

In an earnings call, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said that less time is being spent watching Stories from friends on Snapchat.

Instead, Snapchat users are increasingly moving to watch videos on Spotlight, a TikTok feature and Snapchat rival.

“This is a continuation of the trend we have observed throughout the pandemic, and friend story posting and viewing per daily active user have not returned to pre-pandemic levels,” Spiegel told the analysts late on Thursday. 

“While we are hopeful our community will in time return to the friends story behaviours that we observed prior to the pandemic, we are focused on innovating on our content offerings to better serve our community today,” he added.

Earlier, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that TikTok is growing fast. “People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly,” he said during Meta’s earnings call this week.

The global consumer spending in TikTok has only continued to grow. Users spent approximately $2.3 billion last year in the mobile app, which includes the iOS version of its Chinese localisation Douyin. This figure represents 77 per cent year-over-year growth from $1.3 billion in 2020, reports Sensor Tower.

Consumer spending in ByteDance’s short video platform reached $824.4 million in Q4 2021, more than double the $382.4 million generated during the same period in 2020. Although China remains TikTok’s largest market in terms of consumer spending, its share has diminished significantly. In Q4 2021, 57 per cent of spending came from Chinese users, whereas China’s App Store represented 85 per cent of in-app spending in Q4 2020.

The US maintained its rank as the number two revenue-generator for TikTok, with its share in spending growing Y/Y. In June 2020, the Indian government banned the popular short-form video app TikTok along with several other Chinese apps amid border tensions with China.