Sandra never thought of making a career on TikTok. Like so many other young people in the Generation Z, those who sometimes seem to have been born with a mobile in hand, opened an account in the Chinese ‘app’ in the hard times of the pandemic. “I wanted an escape route and a tool to educate people in what I know, which is law and labor relations,” the 23-year-old creator now recalls in conversation with ABC. One day, suddenly, the machine’s algorithm did some magic and she managed to make one of her videos, specifically one in which she talked about racism towards black people in Spain, go viral. It was then that the thousands of ‘likes’ and hundreds of thousands of followers arrived.
Today, with her account, called Kitten Salix, around a million ‘followers’, the Chinese ‘app’ has become the tool with which Sandra pays her expenses and saves. «If they took it away from me, it would be like losing my job and being thrown out on the street. I would lose my community, I would feel as if they were censoring me, “she says. And this is something that is likely to happen in the United States soon.
After the failed attempt by Donald Trump in 2020, the current president of the North American country, Joe Biden, has issued an ultimatum to TikTok’s Chinese investors (20% of its shareholders) forcing them to sell their stake in the application so that it continues to operate in the United States. The reason: fear that the platform will transfer data from American users to the Chinese government. After the US, EU, Canada or UK have forced the removal of the ‘app’ from government devices, the future of the site in the West is more uncertain than ever. And neither the content creators who make a living from video and trends, nor the representation companies, who take care of their affairs, are unaware of this reality.
the great fishing ground
The number of Spanish digital ‘influencers’ does not stop growing. According to a study by the representation agency 2btube, in 2022 the number of professional national creators, those with more than 100,000 followers, grew to 9,100, 23% more than in 2021. And an important part of it’s TikTok’s fault. “It has introduced us to so many talents that would not be known if it weren’t for this app. In the end, in this business you are always looking for new faces”, Blanca Rabena, director of services at 2btube, explains to this newspaper. And it is that the ability to viralize of the tool makes it much easier to stand out in the Chinese ‘app’ than in competing sites.
Alba, 22, entered TikTok a year ago “without great ambitions.” Although she doesn’t have many followers, just 133,000, she doesn’t count on a single video on all of her accounts that she has less than 10,000 views. Many of them leave above 100,000 or even a million. All thanks to a disease that causes her to have a body full of moles.
“The algorithm viralizes everything that is different,” says the creator. Despite the success he has in the video ‘app’, and that he admits that he would be “very sorry if he lost all the work” he has invested and the stories behind it, the disappearance of the platform would not be the end of the story either. world: «If they take away TikTok you go to another social network. You go to Instagram or YouTube and that’s it».
Despite the fact that the creator lives completely from social networks, she makes her work as a creator compatible with company accounts, she recognizes that, in the end, TikTok is not a tool with which she is generating a lot of income, most of it, in her case, They come from Instagram, a site where it is easier to monetize thanks, among other things, to the possibility of inserting links in the stories that redirect to the store of the brand that hires you. She also notes that the Meta-owned platform is better at building community. «On TikTok I have followers who are not even aware of what is happening to me and ask me about the scars. Nobody on Instagram, because those who follow me know it well, “says the creator.
reinvent or die
Estels, a 26-year-old creator who has a million followers on TikTok, points out, like Alba, that living exclusively from the Chinese ‘app’ is very difficult. Or you alternate and dedicate time to it, or you have few probabilities. “One of the biggest lies on social media is that TikTok makes you a lot of money. If you do not have a ‘sponsor’ and many brands that support you, it is not like that. The social network by itself does not give you anything”, says the young woman. Likewise, she explains that if the use of TikTok is prohibited in the morning “it would not be the overflow of my career either”: “You have to be decisive and look for chestnuts. If people finally want to follow your content, they will do the same on TikTok, on Instagram or on Twitch.
Indeed, many representation agencies have been studying the scenario that, when the time comes, the use of TikTok ends up being restricted in the West. «If it closed it would be a loss, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world», points out Rabena, who points out that, at a commercial level, the ones that would have the worst time would be those companies that seek to direct products to a younger audience, a sector among which TikTok has been a great power for some time. For her part, Marisa Oliver, director of the Hamelin agency, highlighted the foreseeable loss of talent in a conversation with ABC: «Clearly it would be time to reinvent itself and look for an alternative. There could be a significant drop in professionals.”