What is TikTokfication?
TikTokfication is the process through which a social media platform becomes TikTok by introducing the ability to post tall, short videos on a feed.
What Causes TikTokfication?
Money.
Platforms see the popularity of TikTok thanks to its short funny music videos recorded with a smartphone and believe that if they copy the format that will lead users of TikTok to just stop using TikTok and use their platform instead for some reason.
It isn't clear if this strategy is successful or if it backfires when the new TikTok format alienates the existing users of the platform who were only using that platform because it specifically wasn't TikTok. After all, if they wanted TikTok videos, they could just use TikTok.
In other news, the phrase "pivot to video" refers to publishers who decide to stop publishing text—a medium that is trivial to create, edit, store, and transmit—and begin focusing on video instead—a medium that is complex to create and edit, and costs orders of magnitude more to store and transmit.
This phrase tends to be associated with businesses in decline that chase the video format with no concrete plan to make pay for the additional production costs. Keep in mind that the number of consumers on the planet doesn't change just because everyone is producing video now instead of text, so these publishers were betting on somehow gaining an audience proportional to the difference in cost of producing video compared to text.
Platforms that become TikTok clones, specially platforms that were originally primarily for static images, are making a similar gamble.
The secret cost of pivoting to video
September 26, 2017, By Heidi N. Moore
[...] Hundreds of journalists have lost their jobs while shiny-object-chasing publishers are no closer to creating cohesive video strategies to replace the traffic those writers were producing. Publishers who pivoted to video have forfeited the majority of their hard-won native audiences in only a year of churning out undifferentiated, bland chunks of largely aggregated “snackable” video. [...]
A pivot to video is really a “pivot to declining pageviews,” as Digiday noted. The numbers are chilling: “According to data from comScore, the publishers that pivoted to video this summer have seen at least a 60 percent drop in their traffic in August compared to the same period from a year ago.”
https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/pivot-to-video.php (2025-04-11)
Was the Media’s Big “Pivot to Video” All Based on a Lie?
By Maya Kosoff, October 17, 2018
In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg made an announcement that would change the course of the digital media world: within five years, he declared, Facebook would primarily consist of video. In response, advertisers and publishers alike began pouring resources into video, at times firing entire teams of writers to instead hire producers to string together short-form, ”snackable” video content. But just four months later, Facebook disclosed a crucial error. For the past two years, the company admitted in an August 2016 post on its advertising help center page, it had massively overestimated the average viewing time for video ads on its platform.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/10/was-the-medias-big-pivot-to-video-all-based-on-a-lie (2025-04-11)
Surf the Web
- [makeuseof.com] 6 Reasons Why Social Media Apps Should Stick to Doing One Thing Well (accessed 2025-04-11).