![]() Instead of the app displaying content that you’ve chosen to see from a collection of friends and other accounts that you’ve curated yourself, a machine-learning algorithm is your curator. The “For You” feed is algorithmically tailored for each TikTok user like snowflakes, no two “For You” feeds are exactly the same. ![]() “I was on the ‘For You’ page a lot,” Li told me. Even so, this figure is still well short of the hundred and eighteen billion dollars that Facebook made in 2021. TikTok is reportedly on track to make nearly ten billion dollars in revenue this year, mostly by selling ads against what is essentially free programming. The genius of TikTok’s business model is that the entertainment is almost entirely composed of user-generated videos, which cost a tiny fraction of the seventeen billion dollars that Netflix, for example, spent on professional content in 2021. To soundtrack their videos, TikTok creators can choose from a vast library of licensed sounds, which are mostly parts of songs, and which vary in length from a few seconds to a minute. According to the data-analytics company Sensor Tower, the average user spends ninety-five minutes on the site-almost twice as long as they linger on the Gram.Īt first, Li was only a viewer, rather than a “creator,” as TikTok flatteringly refers to anyone who uploads videos. Sixty-seven per cent of all American teen-agers use the app, and their parents are joining now, too. ![]() Facebook, by comparison, which was launched in 2004, has 2.9 billion monthly users. ByteDance engineered a new algorithm for Musical.ly, and merged its users with those of TikTok.īy mid-2021, thanks to teen-agers like Li, TikTok had reached a billion active monthly users. In 2017, Musical.ly was bought by ByteDance, a Chinese startup that had previously created Toutiao, an algorithmically fed news aggregator Douyin, a short-form-video platform available only in China and TikTok, a Douyin-like app for the rest of the world. She posted videos of herself lip-synching and dancing to trending songs on the app. In 2014, Li downloaded Musical.ly, an app for sharing short, user-generated videos which had been launched in Shanghai that year by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Alex Zhu and Yang Luyu, and quickly became popular in the U.S. She began to doubt herself, wondering, Are people interested? Is this realistic? Fifty views, mostly friends, was a good showing. But Katherine Li’s YouTube videos did not go viral. She hoped to follow the bedroom-to- Billboard path blazed by her countryman Justin Bieber, who was discovered on YouTube in 2008, and, more recently, by Mendes himself, another Canadian, who broke out in 2013 on Vine, a short-form-video platform. Her showpiece was Richard Clayderman’s “Mariage d’Amour.” But, apart from singing in the choir at school, and occasionally busking with Alice (who was chosen as an official subway musician by the Toronto Transit Commission), her only public vocal performances were the YouTube videos she made in her room, in which she sang covers of songs by Taylor Swift, Julia Michaels, and Shawn Mendes. ![]() Katherine began piano lessons in first grade, and could sight-read music. “I’ve looked up to her my whole life,” Katherine said, of her big sister. She sang, modelled, acted, danced, and won beauty pageants. ![]() She thought that Katherine would attend medical school and become a pediatrician. “The best in everything,” Maggie told me, with fierce pride. Their middle daughter was an outstanding student. The Lis, who speak Mandarin at home, left Beijing for Canada in October, 2001, “in search of a better life,” as Chengwu Li, a mechanical engineer, put it. Her mother had imagined Katherine’s future differently. By the end of middle school, she was still thinking, I believe in myself, and I can totally do this! “I’d see all the music and think, That looks so fun! I really want to do that!” she told me. As a tween, Katherine became obsessed with Nickelodeon’s “Victorious,” a sitcom about a teen musical artist, played by Victoria Justice Ariana Grande was among the cast members. When Maggie Li was pursuing her master’s degree in economics at the University of Ottawa, Katherine was born, in 2003, and Maggie would put the crib in front of the TV with music videos or music-oriented programming playing while she studied. Like many Gen Z kids, Li grew up steeped in social media (she started using Instagram in third grade) and in music, much of it transmitted visually. ![]()
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