Hickory Dickory Dock, I Just Discovered Tik Tok

Blogging, humor, lessons learned, technology 2 Minutes

I’d heard about and read about Tik Tok, but it wasn’t until this past week that I actually went to the site to check out what it was all about.

I know I’m late to the game, but I figured if I’m going to be teaching college students (according to Global Web Index, 41% of TikTok users are between 16 and 24 years old), I should probably be a little bit aware of what they are up to.

The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. It is popular in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world. TikTok has been downloaded about 80 million times in the United States, and 800 million times worldwide

One of my students told me it as a bit like Vine, which I always thought offered people a chance to show off their creative abilities. So if Tik Tok offered its users the same opportunity, then I figured I would probably like it.

I have not spent a lot of time looking through Tik Tok videos, but of the ones I have seen, I am not impressed.

Tik Tok recently put together its top 100 videos of 2019, broken down into 10 categories, with 10 videos in each category. I thought this would be a great place to start, especially with the category Top 10 Viral Videos. Of those, I only found a couple that I liked.

This first one has over 17 million likes:

This video “only” has 1.5 million likes.

The most popular person on Tik Tok is Loren Gray. I had never heard of Loren before, but she has over 36 million followers on Tik Tok. Loren has been on Tik Tok since 2015, when it was first called musical.ly.

Herre’s one of her videos that has over 3.6 million likes:

Maybe it’s my age, but none of these videos impress me.

However, one of the things I remember from Vine was the clever special effects magic videos, and fortunately, there are some of that genre on Tik Tok. Here are three videos, all from Zach King, to balance out the three videos from above:

Tik Tok seems like the perfect medium for someone like Zach; he’s got more than 28 million followers.

As to the other videos shown here, I’ll just have to accept the fact that I am not in the targeted demographic that Tik Tok seems to aim for. I doubt very much if they, or the people who put these videos together, care that much about what I have to say.

Come to think of it, they sound a lot like my readers…

Published by Jim Borden

A 60-something guy trying to figure out the world, and his place in it. Happily married for 40-plus years, three wonderful sons. Accounting teacher, fitness enthusiast, blogger, reader.

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28 thoughts on “Hickory Dickory Dock, I Just Discovered Tik Tok”

  4. One of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes comes to mind “All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.”

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      1. But not all videos or movies have equal value, either… there’s a reason Love, Actually is rightfully considered one of the best holiday movies 😉 Not all are. Yes, I’m in a holiday movie mood, have been for a while 🙂

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  6. Gary Vaynerchuk has been recommending using Tiktok as a way for businesses to connect with their audience/market, but it can be difficult. Recently, my wife and I checked it out to see if we can use the medium to build her youtube audience. It took us hours trying to figure what to create over there. We never got to make even one. It is indeed tough. I applaud creators who manage to do something creative aside from the usual dance challenge and funny dubs.

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    1. thanks for your comment, Ed. And I agree that most Tik-Tok videos are a waste of time, but I do like to see people trying to be creative with a new technology. I enjoyed your post; thanks for letting me know about it. I also saw that you have a post about Barcelona – I plan to read that one as well.

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