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The ad business
Whether or not it is banned, the app has forced its rivals to adopt a less lucrative model
Is tiktok's time up? As the social-media app's chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, was getting ready for a grilling before Congress on March 23rd, after The Economist went to press, TikTok's loom-plus users in America were fretting that their government was preparing to ban the Chinese-owned platform because of security fears. Their anguish contrasts with utter glee in Silicon Valley, where home-grown social-media firms would love to be rid of their popular rival. With every grumble from Capitol Hill, the share prices of Meta, Pinterest, Snap and others edge higher.
TikTok's fate hangs in the balance. But what is already clear is that the app has changed social media for good-and in a way that will make life harder for incumbent social apps. In less than six years TikTok has weaned the world off old-fashioned social-networking and got it hooked on algorithmically selected short videos. Users love it. The trouble for the platforms is that the new model makes less money than the old one, and may always do so.
The speed of the change is astonishing. Since entering America in 2017, TikTok has picked up more users than all but a handful of social-media apps, which have been around more than twice as long (see chart 1 on next page). Among young audiences, it crushes the competition. Americans aged 18-24 spend an hour a day on TikTok, twice as long as they spend on Instagram and Snapchat, and more than five times as long as they spend on Facebook, which these days is mainly a medium for communicating with the grandparents (see chart 2).
TikTok's success has prompted its rivals to reinvent themselves. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has turned both apps' main feeds into algorithmically sorted "discovery engines" and launched Reels, a TikTok clone bolted onto Facebook and Instagram. Similar lookalike products have been created by Pinterest (Watch), Snapchat (Spotlight), YouTube (Shorts), and even Netflix (Fast Laughs). The latest TikTok-inspired makeover, announced on March 8th, was by Spotify, a music-streaming app whose homepage now features video clips that can be skipped...