TikTok rivals like Triller battle for influencers as US ban looms, but some say no other platform compares

Name: Global expansion of TikTok and other Chinese tech companies is likely, only not in the West
Uploaded: 2020-10-19T23:00:09.000Z
Duration: 6 min 2 s
Description: Global expansion of TikTok and other Chinese tech companies is likely, only not in the West

Competitors are already taking advantage of TikTok’s impending shutdown to entice its users and creators to switch platforms, the app’s lawyers say

Trump-approved Triller is reportedly dangling equity and official company positions for TikTok stars to tell followers they are switching platforms

Reading Time:5 minutes

Why you can trust SCMP

American short video app Triller shot to the top of data provider Sensor Tower’s charts for free iPhone apps in the US after President Donald Trump threatened to ban TikTok. Photo: Getty Images

Tracy QuandCoco Feng

Published: 7:00am, 20 Oct 2020Updated: 3:36pm, 20 Oct 2020

In early August, after US President Donald Trump first threatened to put Chinese-owned short video giant TikTok “out of business”, smaller American rival Triller shot to the top of data provider Sensor Tower’s charts for free iPhone apps in the US.

Singapore-based Likee, another similar app, climbed to eighth place among free iPhone apps in photo and video category in the same month, before falling back to 37th place this week.

In total, TikTok-owner ByteDance’s four largest competitors almost doubled their market share from 24 per cent in January to 44 per cent in August, according to Sensor Tower.

06:02

Global expansion of TikTok and other Chinese tech companies is likely, only not in the West

“Competitors are already taking, and will continue to take, advantage of this impending shutdown to entice TikTok creators and users to switch platforms,” TikTok’s lawyers argued last week in a court filing seeking an injunction against the US ban.

YouTube has launched a short-form video feature called Shorts, allows creators to “shoot short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones”, while Instagram’s similar Reels function is now available in more than 50 markets.

Trump-approved Triller, in particular, appears to be zooming in on some of TikTok’s biggest stars. Charli D’Amelio, the ByteDance-owned app’s most popular content creator, is among the TikTok celebrities that recently started Triller accounts. Sixteen-year-old D’Amelio, who has 87 million TikTok followers, debuted on Triller last month and has accumulated 5.7 million followers on the platform so far.

Select Voice

Choose your listening speed

Get through articles 2x faster

1.25x

250 WPM

Slow

Average

Fast

00:0000:00

1.25x