TikTok App Turns on the Money Machine, Threatens Facebook, Google
Alyssa McKay used to work part-time at a frozen yogurt store in Portland, Oregon, making minimum wage to cover her college tuition. Now the 22-year-old earns more than $100,000 a year on the short-video platform TikTok. Brands like Coach, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video pay up to reach her 9 million followers, mostly teenage and pre-teen girls who wouldn’t dream of visiting Facebook.
“TikTok definitely 100% changed my life,” says McKay, who recently moved into her first apartment with her wiener dog.
The most downloaded app of 2021,the platform has long helped creators like McKay step to the center of the attention economy, the company is only now starting to cash in on all that popularity.
TikTok raked in nearly $4 billion in revenue in 2021, mostly from advertising, and is projected to hit $12 billion this year, according to the research firm eMarketer. That would make it bigger than Twitter Inc. and Snap Inc. combined -- three years after it started accepting ads on the platform.
“It’s definitely a threat to Google and Facebook,” said Pieter-Jan de Kroon, chief executive officer of the online ad firm Entravision MediaDonuts. “TikTok is starting to command a percentage of the media budget that’s more in line with its audience size.”
Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook, now Meta Platforms Inc., are the giants of online advertising, a duopoly so powerful they have been hit with antitrust complaints in the US, the UK and the European Union. TikTok and parent ByteDance Ltd. is shaping up to be the most serious threat to that chokehold since the pair rose to power over the past two decades.
With a billion monthly active users, TikTok is still smaller than Facebook (2.9 billion) and Instagram (2 billion), also part of
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