Now hold that thought for a moment. It’s trickier to find consensus on this
one. To me, TikTok is a medley of weirdly transfixing water-balloon videos, mon-
arch butterfly activists, air-fried ice cream sandwich recipes, and Bo Burnham
mashups. Come on, Jerey, you can do it./Pave the way, put your back into it!
But your TikTok is surely something radically different. Because that’s how
the algorithm wants it. “The algorithm.” You hear those two words a lot when
TikTok is the topic of conversation. It’s the mysterious, all-seeing recommen-
dation engine that powers the platform. It instantly digests every pause, click,
swipe, and share to serve up the ultimate brain candy buffet—unlimited help-
ings of 15-second, 30-second, or, sometimes but rarely, three-minute videos that
have a way of gluing users to their
phones for hours at a time. The algo-
rithm is damn good at what it does.
So much so that TikTok has been
the most downloaded app for the bet-
ter part of two years. And in late Sep-
tember, the company said that it now
has more than 1 billion monthly active
global users. According to a recent
report by the analytics firm App Annie,
“TikTok has upended the streaming
and social landscape.” In the U.S. and
U.K., users spend more hours on Tik-
Tok, on average, than on YouTube.
Moreover, it has supercharged the
so-called creator economy, a broad
swath of entrepreneurs, influencers,
and side hustlers trying to convert
their looks, humor, wisdom, connec-
tions, inhibition, insights, and dance
moves into riches and stardom. The
social media giants, including Face-
book, Google, Snapchat, Twitch, and
even Pinterest, are all vying for their
share of a market now valued at north
of $104 billion, according to a recent
report by Neo Ranch and Influencer
Marketing Hub. A raft of start-
ups—from Cameo and Clubhouse to
Substack and Only Fans—are carving
out their own niches. And then there’s
TikTok, which has weathered a politi-
cal firestorm, a federal investigation,
numerous lawsuits, a global pandem-
ic, and a couple near-acquisitions to
find itself at the top of the heap.
The man charged with convert-
ing its position at the center of the
zeitgeist into a revenue stream worthy
of Facebook and Google is TikTok’s
president of global business solutions,
Blake Chandlee. Chandlee has been
with the company for most of its me-
teoric rise. His previous gig was as VP
of global partnerships at Facebook,
where he managed relationships with
brands and marketing agencies.
Speaking from his palatial Austin
home, Chandlee draws many com-
parisons to his previous job, which
he held for more than a dozen years.
Joining TikTok in early 2019 was, heLet’s warm up with a bit
of word association.
I say Facebook!
You say...Boomer!
Amirite? (Also acceptable: Disinformation!)
I say Twitter!
You s ay... D o omscroll!
(Half a point for a dismissive eye roll.)
I say Instagram!
You say...Poser!
OK, one more?
I say TikTok!
You s ay...
THE TIKTOK ECONOMY