‘It’s about providing and being delighted’

The former CEO of TikTok and former chief operating officer of the parent company ByteDance Ltd, Kevin Mayer, today co-CEO and co-founder of the company Candle Media talks to Kathimerini about the “secrets” that established TikTok at the top of the charts of young people.

I would like to start by asking what TikTok is, what the original goals of the app were, and what was and probably still is the vision of the digital platform?

Its stated mission was to bring joy to the internet, to be relatively light and fun and not too political. Meaning it is not like the former Twitter. TikTok is more of an entertainment platform. In fact, the mission of TikTok was not and is not really to communicate one-to-one, but it is really about looking at videos that are chosen for you by a massive AI engine and being delighted, being joyful and just seeing things you want to see and getting engaged in the app.

How does TikTok differentiate itself from other social media platforms, like Instagram, and why did it become so popular?

Instagram is a social graph. It is a way for you to communicate with your friends and people you know or strangers who happen upon your page and want to be involved. So, you choose your followers, and the videos are delivered to your feed from your followers. TikTok is entirely different. It is not configured to communicate very efficiently with your friends, and should you choose to follow people it does not factor into the algorithm in any substantial way anyway. TikTok is about providing and being delighted and also doing your share to provide delightful entertainment for whoever the algorithm decides should see it. Both platforms provide for getting famous and it is much easier to get famous quickly on TikTok, but it can just as easily fade because it is not a social graph-driven algorithm. In Instagram, it is harder to get big, but once you are big, you have your social graph which tends to be stable and perpetuated.

How does TikTok’s famous algorithm work and how does TikTok balance between promoting popular content and introducing new content to users?

The way it works is very complicated, but suffice it to say, TikTok does not know what’s in each video that is uploaded. That would be impossible. The velocity and volume of uploaded video are so substantial. Therefore, it does not recognize if you are featured on TikTok videos if you have liked videos of tennis players, videos of girls in bikinis, or even videos of alligators. It does not know that, but it does know that the videos that you click on appeal to other groups of people who have similar interests. So, the app makes some assumptions right off the bat. Within the first few minutes of you using it, you look like you are a subset of these interests. And then they start feeding you videos to confirm it. And when you start interacting with those videos, if you like them, if you watch them multiple times, you do not dismiss them quickly and then you get more of those. And then every so often they will introduce a new, completely unrelated video to see if you might have interest in that type of video. And again, they do not know what’s in the videos, but they know that this video appealed to a totally different interest group than you are in and test it on you, to see if some of your interests belong to that group. And thus, composing the content of your preferences.

‘I think the expectations of the new generation have been molded by their use of TikTok. They want faster things. They want things to happen quickly’ 

TikTok established and enhanced short-form video content. In your view, how has TikTok transformed digital entertainment?

It has added value to videos, which for the most part would not, on a stand-alone basis, be considered very valuable and also have a very low production value like people dancing or making a nice tennis shot or even a new sewing technique. So, the diversity of the content is astounding. But the key is that you get to see exactly the types of videos you love in the stream that you really like, and the time and place of the choosing of the algorithm, which knows when you want to see a certain thing. The algorithm knows that in the late afternoon, you’d rather see more workout videos and also can recognize when they should be delivering specific types of videos. So, the algorithm is so sophisticated that it has taken quality storytelling away as the most important element and put very sophisticated recommendations as the primary value proposition, including very low production value videos like the ones I mentioned before (tennis shots).

Millions of Gen Z youth upload videos to TikTok every day and interact with other users. In your opinion, how has TikTok shaped the new generation of teens and their perception of interacting with the world (e.g. digital socialization)?

I think the expectations of the new generation have been molded by their use of TikTok. They want faster things. They want things to happen quickly. The younger generation is less inclined to watch a football game from start to finish. They just want to look at the highlights because they can see those on TikTok. Also, this generation shows a desire for more visual dynamism than my generation preferred. Personally, I am happy to sit in front of a television or a phone and watch an entire football game from start to finish, and that is how I like to watch, but this pleasure has been chopped up into more short-form content of the platform, and I think that’s the way the younger generation prefers to follow the news. Now, television shows and movies are not going to go away, but there is now a contention for that time and it is substantial.

Recently the United States Congress accused TikTok of being linked to the Chinese government through its parent company ByteDance and acting as a Trojan horse creating security risks in the US. In the same vein, the European Union is considering banning the app in the EU. In your experience, are the senators’ concerns realistic? If not, how did you secure users’ personal data from malicious actions?

Yes, I was [at ByteDance] for a short period of time and I was never in China. So, I have no direct knowledge of where data reside. I just do not know. And it is hard to believe that TikTok, given the uses and the videos that are on the platform, may pose a security threat for the US. Now ByteDance does own TikTok and ByteDance is a Chinese company. There is no denying it. So, the question that I do not know how to respond to is how much influence the Chinese government has over these companies and so I do not know if they do have control over ByteDance. Another concern the government has is about propaganda because many young people are using that algorithm to get their news. And that algorithm is controlled by ByteDance which means that ByteDance could conceivably “tweak” the algorithm to show things that they want to show and to influence public views. I guess that this is theoretically possible, but I have not seen it happen. And I do not believe that ByteDance, left to their own devices, would do such a thing.

In 2021 you co-founded Candle Media to enable creator-driven platforms to produce premium content, while in 2023 you developed a strategic partnership with TikTok. In your opinion, what is the value of content and, by extension, personalized content, and what is your vision for next-generation digital content?

At Candle Media, we have a content company called Moonbug. Moonbug is based on short-form YouTube videos. One of the characters that they present is called CoComelon, and it is the biggest preschool character in the world by a very large margin and has 175 million subscribers on YouTube. Therefore, YouTube is probably TikTok’s biggest single competitor, especially with shorts. YouTube has a vertical video version that competes directly with TikTok and probably has more monthly users than TikTok actually does around the world, not including China. That is the ecosystem where we make a lot of money from deploying those videos. On the other hand, TikTok has to be careful about users under 13, and it does not have the same degree of safety parameters that YouTube does. When they get there, that is a platform that I would love to deploy my content on and it is perfectly suited for it. The other thing that TikTok has to do that YouTube does better is to share revenue with creators. You know, YouTube shares about 55% of all ad revenue with creators, and TikTok typically has a shared no ad revenue with creators. Creators can go get their own brand deals done and keep the money from that.

Lastly, there is an emerging capability of TikTok that is called “Pulse Premiere,” where you can take ads and place them next to videos that the advertiser wants to be placed next to. So TikTok becomes an emerging partner of ours because we can put our content on TikTok and advertisers can choose to advertise within that frame.