As it turns out, news of TikTok’s demise has been greatly exaggerated… just like everything else about TikTok.
Unless you think the popular short-form video social media platform is spelled “Tick Tock” or has a “the” in front of it, you’re probably caught up on the “will it” or “won’t it” be banned drama, which has been playing out for as long as you can remember, which thanks to TikTok is only about four seconds.
TikTok has more than 1.9 billion users worldwide and 170 million in the U.S. Adding to their stranglehold on the public consciousness has been the legal battle launched when the U.S. Congress passed the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” It was signed into law on April 24, 2024, and it required TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to divest its interest by Jan. 19, 2025, or face a nationwide ban.
The weekend of Jan. 19 was particularly melodramatic with people posting farewells and eulogies on TikTok and all of the other short form video platforms before TikTok went dark. The mourning was short lived, however, as TikTok came back from the dead mere hours after it shut down when then President-Elect Donald Trump said he would work to delay the ban and help negotiate a solution, such as the sale to an American company.
I won’t rehash all of the back-and-forth, but there’s a pretty good summary here at Axios.
All politics of this issue aside, if you look at TikTok as a marketing channel, as I do, you can’t help but see that their future is bright. Since P.T. Barnum first began saying “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” in the late 1800s, we’ve all seen people profit from being talked about, even scoundrels and criminals… or maybe especially scoundrels and criminals. TikTok seems to fall into that category.
I work on a college campus and my team is responsible for social media platforms. This affords me the opportunity to know about lots of platforms people use to connect and communicate. Or at least have younger staff members I can go ask about platforms people use to connect and communicate.
For the record, I know the names of lots of platforms and even have accounts on most of them, but how to best leverage them to gain attention for my employer or even the humble New South Essays media empire is often beyond me.
TikTok is especially opaque. My 16-year-old helped me create an account and record my first video on the app WAY back in September 2022. I have posted exactly twice and it has nothing at all to do with my fear of the Chinese government getting my data. The fact is, Americans have been using my data against my will for a very long time, and I have had my credit card number stolen more than once by entities on American soil.
But New South Essays poses a serious question: What is the fate of this beloved platform?
To understand what’s at the heart of TikTok’s appeal, look no further than its essence: short video clips algorithmically delivered to keep you glued to the app as long as possible. It is scientifically designed to keep you from looking away. The more time you spend on the app, the better it is at holding your attention. (A word of warning to newbies: it serves you more of what you look at, so be careful what you click on. One misstep and it can take a while to get to what you really want to be served.)
Almost all of the social media platforms have short form video capability with YouTube being the longest and most successful player in the space. But even that relatively venerable app has shifted its business model and format because of TikTok’s popularity.
You heard it here first: TikTok will not be going away. There’s too much money at stake. With so many people making a living on the platform and so many others making themselves available to receive marketing messages, there’s just too much financial incentive to keep it open for the lucrative U.S. market.
But even if TikTok the brand goes away, short form video is here to stay. Admit it, even if you don’t have TikTok, you have been caught in a video rabbit hole on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube looking up from your device to discover you can’t meaningfully account for the last hour-plus of your life. It is addictive.
As a fan of stand-up comedy, I think the platforms’ delivery of short form video is at least partly responsible for the boom in that art form. You can literally have one joke at a time delivered to you by your favorite comedian at your leisure. And that’s just the comedy world. Nevermind the creation of the “influencer” career track which has supplanted “podcaster” as the weirdest career title that used to be a joke but now is seriously used on LinkedIn.
Whether or not TikTok by name exists, the format is with us for the foreseeable future. You can cope by following the old Scouts motto: Be prepared.
Stop with the endless scrolling and fretting over whether or not TikTok is going away. Go find your favorite content providers on all of the other platforms. The content is the true commodity here, not the app itself. Most of the content creators have already grown their following on multiple sites based on their experience in the past with other platforms going out of business (e.g. Vine, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, etc.).
Who knows? If TikTok is sold and stays around, perhaps New South Essays may launch its own channel. I can think of nothing more scintillating than a video of me posting weekly musings on the contemporary South broken into eight-second increments. Talk about going viral. I know, you’re already feeling sick just thinking about it. But I guess that’s a different kind of viral.
I could also see how A New South Essays channel would be of particular interest to the Chinese government. They may even discover the secret to Granny’s biscuits.
New South Essays 