TikTok offers a “very different” user experience compared to Facebook, according to testimony from a former executive at both companies that was introduced into evidence today during a high-profile social media monopolization suit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission against Meta Platforms.
TikTok offers a “very different” user experience compared to Facebook, according to testimony from a former executive at both companies that was introduced into evidence today during a high-profile social media monopolization suit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission against Meta Platforms.During video deposition played today in the District of Columbia, recently departed TikTok executive Blake Chandlee spoke from the perspective of his role overseeing advertising, marketing and “anything touching monetization” at the company.
Chandlee said it was fair to describe TikTok as an “entertainment platform.”
His testimony today followed FTC in-house financial analyst Kevin Hearle’s presentation estimating that Meta paid about $11 billion more than WhatsApp was worth as a stand-alone company and has lost billions of dollars on its road to monetizing the messaging platform (see here).
Chandlee also described his rationale behind prior public statements comparing TikTok to television and agreed with the proposition that users “check Facebook” and “watch TikTok” based on the “very different” user experiences happening on each platform.
Differences in the core uses and characteristics of digital platforms is a major point of contention in the case, in which the FTC claims Meta should be broken up after illegally maintaining a monopoly over personal social networking services (see here).
Chandlee’s deposition testimony also touched on his 12-year tenure at Meta, which ended around 2020.
Having become generally familiar with user demographic data in Meta’s possession as part of communicating the company’s value proposition to advertisers, Chandlee said the social networking platform has a “much better advantage” over TikTok when it comes to collecting user information that is then fed into algorithms responsible for targeted advertising.
“We’re still early on our ad load journey at TikTok,” Chandlee testified, speaking to a commonly heard term during the trial that refers to what proportion of ads users see compared to other content.
Chandlee echoed earlier trial testimony from Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom by highlighting the risk that people will move away from platforms that serve them too many ads and become “over-commercialized.”
TikTok does not vary its ad load based on particular groups of users, Chandlee said, but rather based on a “country-level decision.”
He pegged the ad load experienced by US users at 10 to 12 percent, claiming that TikTok has never “pushed ad load to a point where its adversely affecting user behavior.”
“But we watch it closely as we increase ad load based on increased demand,” he added.
— Hating Instagram’s algorithm —
During his deposition, Chandlee was shown an internal slide presentation from 2019 on top social media trends. One of the slides in that presentation was titled: “Why people ‘hate’ Instagram’s algorithm.”
The slide characterizes TikTok as a content-driven “short video platform” and Instagram as a relationship-driven “social platform.”
Chandlee characterized TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation system as a “pure content play” as opposed to a recommendation approach on Instagram “triggered by real relationships with friends and family.”
Rather than linking content recommendations to a social graph that maps real-life relationships, TikTok’s “interest-based graph” has enabled the company to create a “new, innovative way to discover content,” he said.
TikTok competes with a variety of platforms and media channels, including television, radio, “outdoor” and “digital players,” he said. The vectors of that competition are advertising budgets and users’ time and attention, he added.
“We compete with Twitter. We compete with Instagram. We compete with Amazon. We compete with Snapchat,” Chandlee said. “We compete across the board.”
Facebook’s development of a stories feature was a competitive response to Snapchat, according to Chandlee. But he was more circumspect when asked to weigh in on the competitive dynamics involved between TikTok, Facebook and Instagram’s video products.
“I think user behavior is shifting, and everybody's having to adapt.”
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