To focus on its community, TikTok in July formed a Creator Fund, where creators can earn cash for views, starting with $200 million. And with the pandemic forcing people indoors for the foreseeable future, Ms. Pappas said she and her team were working on making TikTok an uplifting place to visit. Last month, the company launched a largest national advertising campaign on television and digital media, highlighting more than 30 popular creators under the tagline “It starts on TikTok.”
“We’ve built this product for hundreds of millions of people, and we’re not looking for that to change,” said Ms. Pappas, a former YouTube executive.
But keeping TikTok’s community happy in such a turbulent period may be challenging. Some creators and fans have been rattled by Mr. Trump’s moves against the app. Since his executive order, people in the United States have installed TikTok about 6.5 million times, down 13 percent from before the order, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.
Competitors have also pounced. Facebook introduced Reels, a TikTok clone inside Instagram, in August. The social network has also doled out millions of dollars to some of TikTok’s biggest stars to lure them over to using Reels.
Ms. Pappas said she wasn’t worried about Facebook and Instagram Reels. “You can certainly copy a feature, but you can’t copy a community,” she said. “I think that’s really hard to replicate.”
Tom Keiser, chief executive of Hootsuite, a social media management company, said TikTok was right to make its power users a priority.
“They need to be investing in those folks,” he said. “There’s so many things out of their control, but their future growth is based on influencers and content creators continuing to evolve and grow and leverage the new capabilities TikTok is rolling out.”
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/technology/tiktok-vanessa-pappas-bytedance.html
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