Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori :
Regardless of my opinion on TikTok, this video-sharing service has a story to be told, and a lesson to be learnt from. The TikTok app was released in 2016 and in no time gained massive popularity in the social media market and shuffled the business. In about a year, the application had crossed the borders of its birth place, China, positioning itself as a strong peer to its largest competitors. A year later, it acquired Musical.ly for almost $1 billion.
During that short period, the application captured 800 million active users worldwide, with almost 150 million daily active users being in China, and 80 million in the United States of America. Most of the users were teenagers.
As a consequence, there arose a frantic competition between the rising TikTok, which is a startup, and the YouTube app that suddenly seemed to have found itself akin to a dinosaur struggling to survive – a classic reflection of the eternal struggle between the old and new.
In this war between the two apps, many weapons were being used. In India, YouTube supporters sought to undermine TikTok by dismissing it as an app for the uneducated masses, as opposed to YouTube, which continues to be the first choice of the high class and upwardly mobile.
However, TikTok continued to grow. It was estimated to be valued around tens of billions of dollars until Indian authorities banned it in June 2020.
This was a severe hit to the developer ByteDance, but the strongest blow was when this became a bone of contention between the US and China. And then, Microsoft offered to acquire TikTok.
The war on TikTok involves not only commercial and political dimensions but also security concerns. We do not know which of these factors are the most reasonable, but I believe that one of the highlights of its journey is that the future is for those who innovate; as, innovation is the strongest element of winning a competition.
Another important aspect of the fight to win the ownership of TikTok is the race to win the new generation, the digital age generation, because whoever wins today’s children wins tomorrow’s men and women.
(Hamad Obaid Al Mansoori is the Director General, TRA)
