India Bans TikTok 2.0 - Effects

It has been a see-saw ride for TikTok in India. In the past year, TikTok has gone through 2 bans. This is one example that clearly shows the deep impact of government policies on corporations.

There are more than 200M active TikTok users in India. It has had a fast market penetration like no other social media beyond the tier 1 and tier 2 cities in India.

While we know that this ban would not be a permanent one, there are few implications it would have on TikTok and ByteDance's business

Here is my view

Adoption and usage Many influencers as they are called, rose to stardom through TikTok. Many are diversifying their portfolio and are generating content for other platforms. With 2 subsequent bans, the investment of time by content generators for specific TikTok content would reduce, slowing adoption by new and usage by existing users.

Advertising Revenue Loss With the recent difficulty that Facebook is going through, major brands are moving their advertising spends to other social media platforms. TikTok had a huge pie to earn from this in India which they are bound to lose with the ban.

Trust The content I have been seeing doing rounds in media and social media speaks about the privacy and access concerns of the app. This effectuates serious damage of trust and TikTok would have to intervene with an elaborate PR exercise to build it back.

Competitors

Google(Tangi), Facebook(Instagram reels, Lasso{facebook says, it might pivot off this), Zee5(HiPi) are all launching their short-form video apps soon in India (These have already been launched in certain geographies). They would have an advantage and serious momentum to earn with TikTok, not in the picture.

While there are political differences, I had written a previous article on why it should not be banned for a different reason and I still stick by it now. A few more random thoughts on this 1. Corporations being stuck in a political ceasefire affects people more - employees, users, and other dependent businesses. 2. Data Privacy and Security concerns need to be thoroughly and deeply investigated by Google and Apple who run the Play and App stores respectively. There is no laxation on user and information safety. 3. To the content creators on the platform - This wouldn't be a new beginning but what its called a pivot. All the learnings would help you learn a lot more during this time about many other platforms and would help you expand.