What are TikTok’s new owners buying?

THE LONG SAGA of who should own the world’s favourite short-video app is nearly over. On September 25th Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing the app to continue operating in America, on the basis that its Chinese owner, ByteDance, is to sell most of its stake in TikTok’s American operations. ByteDance will own less than 20% of the app, with most of the rest being bought by American investors. The deal, which has 120 days to close, marks the beginning of the end of a years-long saga, marked by threats of bans and tense calls between presidents. Our charts show who and what is on the much-discussed platform.

The president’s interest in the platform is primarily down to reach and influence. More than 116m Americans use TikTok every month. It is particularly popular among young Americans. The most voracious are 18- to 25-year-olds who, in June, spent nearly an hour a day scrolling or posting videos. For teenagers it is the app of choice: they spend more time on TikTok than on YouTube and Instagram combined (see chart 1). Mr Trump has credited TikTok content with helping him overperform with young voters in last year’s election. The president may be hoping that the platform will continue to favour him—among the new owners are several firms controlled by his allies.

That reach makes TikTok a commercial powerhouse. Analysts reckon its American revenue—largely from advertising and e-commerce—will hit $20bn this year. Next year its American ad sales will grow by nearly a quarter, forecasts eMarketer, a research firm. Even with the spectre of a ban it has remained one of America’s most-downloaded apps this year, according to Sensor Tower, another research company. But cracks are appearing. The time that Americans spend on the platform is falling (see chart 2) as rivals such as Instagram and YouTube mimic its features, and many users (or their parents) try to limit time spent on phones.

Exactly what users are seeing on TikTok is more difficult to assess. Like other social-media companies, it is cagey about its data and offers no central overview of what is posted. Fortunately, in a working paper published in May this year, researcher Benjamin Steel and co-authors developed a clever way to capture every video published on the platform during short snippets of time. The authors shared a sample of posts published during a random day last year (April 10th 2024), with The Economist. This allows a glimpse of exactly how much, and what, is posted.

The results confirm the app’s reputation for frivolity and aesthetics. TikTok assigns category labels to videos. After removing videos without labels (which made up around 30% of the total sample), 23% were related to entertainment and pop culture, including lip-syncs; 13% to beauty and fashion (see chart 3). About 42% fell into TikTok’s vague “random shoot” category. One striking discovery was the prevalence of children in content. TikTok’s own labels suggested that 4% of posts featured babies, making it the fourth largest single category. Mr Steel and his colleagues trained a machine-learning model to detect children in videos and found that nearly a fifth of all posts in their sample featured minors.

TikTok’s categories should be interpreted with caution—there is no label for politics or conflict, for instance, and the firm does not explain how posts are classified. Hashtags provide a cross-check: beyond generic ones such as #fyp (which stands for For You Page, TikTok’s homepage) and #viral, the most popular in the dataset of 1.9m videos was “#duet,” used more than 16,000 times. The tag “#politics” appeared in just 58 videos.

What users actually see is determined by TikTok’s recommendation algorithm. This is the secret sauce that makes the app so popular and is part of why Mr Trump wanted the app under American control. Whether TikTok will remain as compelling under its new American ownership may hinge on whether the spin-off inherits this data. If not, the algorithm will have to relearn its users’ tastes from scratch. For the millions who have spent years training their feeds, that could be enough to make them swipe away. ■