Everyone's a content creator these days: the ripples caused by Snapchat and TikTok
Content creation democratization and the new gen content creators
Snapchat: less toxic social media?
It wasn’t long that Snapchat was the fastest growing social media platform among Gen Z. The idea of private stories and snaps (short, expiring videos or pictures sent to specific friends) made snapchat occupy a very different space to the ‘public’ nature of Facebook. Even private facebook profiles and instagram profiles (until recently) had no way to gate content to sections of friends and wasn’t seen as something spontaneous.
Snapchat was all about spontaneous and private conversations and it was a relief from the edited and fake nature of other social media platforms. Gen Z loved this and still does.
Snapchat was all about spontaneous and private conversations and it was a relief from the edited and fake nature of other social media platforms.
Everyone wanted to be Snapchat
Snapchat’s formula was so revolutionary that almost every other social media decided to copy something from it. Starting from stories to snaps to bitmoji, everyone wanted to get in the action (even code editors). And it makes sense why - gating content (making it available to subsections of friends and keeping it for 24 hours only), making it spontaneous (snaps and stories were meant to be unfiltered) presented a less toxic social media that everyone wanted to be on.
TikTok had the fastest growth out of any social media platform (until ChatGPT becomes a social media platform that is). Sensor Tower reports that it took TikTok 9 months to reach 100 million users. It took Instagram 2.5 years.
TikTok took the popularity of Vine (which was ahead of its time and fell prey to bad business decisions) and did it better. The idea is short form videos (similar to Snapchat Stories but permanent videos this time) displayed publicly to everyone (you can have a private TikTok but it’s rare).
TikTok looked at Snapchat and Vine and realized it was time to make everyone a content creator.
Snapchat believed everyone wanted to be genuine, spontaneous and private (until it realized public content has more business value)
Vine (and Musical.ly which TikTok bought) helped everyone become a content creator and understood the value of short form and easy to make content
TikTok understood that a lot of people did not want to be private, wanted to create low effort content, wanted to have fun, and be spontaneous.
I strongly believe TikTok wouldn’t have taken off if Vine didn’t fail and if Snapchat didn’t exist. It started at the right time and fostered a creator ecosystem that caused it to explode in popularity.
New gen content creators
Nowadays everyone is a content creator - TikTok made video editing extremely simple (its parent company ByteDance also owns CapCut, an easy video editing platform) and content distribution even more simple. Short form video content makes it easy to recommend videos to everyone; in the span of a minute, a user will see around 20 videos. Their recommendation system is extremely impressive as well.
Instagram (and Facebook) copied TikTok successfully via Reels and Youtube made Shorts. It’s really easy to spread short form content via these super popular channels. Educational content and other traditionally long form content is finding a place on TikTok as well, a platform that people believed belonged to Gen Z and unprofessional content.
I also think this democratization of content has made it easier for people to accept amateur content. There was a time before TikTok (but after Youtube became the defacto video content app) when content was becoming more and more ‘professional’. Youtubers with high production value were dominating the industry. TikTok and short form content platforms helped amateur content blossom and reduce content expectations (at least in terms of production value).
TikTok and short form content platforms helped amateur content blossom and reduce content expectations (at least in terms of production value).
I also believe this has spread to other spaces such as text content (Substack and Medium revolution) and audio (podcasts). Text content is now an area rife with excellent amateur content (I use the word amateur to mean an individual who is a part time writer). I’m glad that the ripples caused by platforms like TikTok have made it so.