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1. Introduction
With the continuous development of social commerce, short video platform has gradually become another area of e-commerce (Mhalla et al., 2020). Launched by ByteDance in September 2016, TikTok (Douyin) is now one of the leading short video mobile apps by number of downloads as well as active users, which allows users to browse other-created contents and post self-created videos (ByteDance, 2018). According to the 2019 data report, Douyin has more than 400 million daily active users. Especially during the epidemic period, merchants prefer to conduct short video sales on Douyin. The main reason is the decentralized delivery mechanism of Douyin, when the system engine receives videos uploaded by users; it analyzes the interests of the user, sorts them, and recommends relevant short videos (Maharjan, 2019). The recommendation mechanism calculates the tag of each uploaded video and classifies the videos according to their category characteristics. It then maps the label of video to users with the same label. Thus, Douyin realized the accurate positioning based on big data algorithms, which further promotes short video marketing (Lu, 2019).
Presently, revenue streams of Douyin mostly from advertisement display and campaigns (Chen, 2017). In-feed advertisements and KOL (key opinion leader) endorsement are two primary advertising tools on Douyin. The in-feed advertisement service, which began in 2016, incorporates advertising messages into the short video (Chen, 2019). Advertising messages are shown underneath short videos, implanting product links in advertising content and thus making it more accessible to users (Plate 1). When a user clicks on the product link or according to times of advertising exposure, the platform charges sellers a service fee (Zhang and Osawa, 2019). KOL endorsement, another advertising tool offered by Douyin, was proposed in 2018 (Windels et al., 2018). The endorser posts short videos of different products to redirect traffic to the seller's website, and they receive a commission based on the effect of ads and the number of followers they own (Plate 2). Essentially, sellers post tasks for products they want to promote on Ocean Engine. Then, the endorsers can contact sellers to discuss the products details, and finally post short videos on Douyin to share the product information such as user experience (Zimmer and Scheibe, 2019). Given the great value of advertising...