The company’s secret sauce is what populates its For You Page, which predicts the videos that will pique a viewer’s interest
It is, quite literally, the trillion dollar question: how did TikTok go from a niche social network for lip-syncing teens to the most popular app in the western world, threatening to knock Facebook off its perch entirely, in just a few short years?
There are no end of possible answers, and TikTok owes its phenomenal success to a host of canny choices: easy-to-use video creation tools blurred the line between creator and consumer far more than YouTube had ever managed; a vast library of licensed music allowed teens to soundtrack their clips without fear of copyright strikes; a billion-dollar advertising campaign across Facebook and Instagram bought new users as quickly as Zuckerberg’s company would send them over.
