TikTok, a business model that sets the standard

It landed in Europe in 2016 and looked like nothing more than a game. Now "it is influencing big giants like Meta-Facebook," explained Eleonora Benecchi, lecturer and researcher at USI Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society, in an interview with Corriere del Ticino.

Thanks especially to younger people, TikTok has become the third most popular application, after Instagram and YouTube. It is also the social network on which people spend the most time: 95 minutes a day, over four times the amount spent on Snapchat (21 minutes), three times the time spent on Twitter (29 minutes), and almost twice the time spent on Facebook (49 minutes). A success that Benecchi first explains by the simplicity of the platform: "Creating a video on TikTok does not require any major skills. The platform offers a number of user-friendly tools to edit and process videos, or even to replicate successful ones." Then there is the ability to keep users' attention by playing off repetition, recognition, novelty and prominence.

"So on the one hand, TikTok works on the creation side, supporting content creators, and on the other, it develops the receiving side, identifying successful videos and providing the tools to replicate them," Benecchi concludes.