Bo Sacks posted an article today about the fastest-growing news publishers on TikTok. He didn’t attach any judgment to the story, but I will.
Publishers – There you go again.
Fool me once, shame on you, fool me a hundred times, call me a publisher.
Platforms are the ever-evolving, ever-new shiny object. They’re the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. If you run fast enough, you’ll get the fairy treasure and be happy for the rest of your life.
Oh … And they have Young People! — that magical demographic that doesn’t have any money but that publishers keep chasing after, often to the point of alienating older people who actually do have money.
The platforms use professional content from publishers to build their own – that is, the platform’s – business. The platforms use content from publishers until it no longer serves their interest. Then they change the rules and replace the publishers.
The publishers get to keep their digital dimes, but the platforms get the customers, and that’s where the dollars are.
But let me step back from my cynicism for a moment, and from the moral question of whether people should support a platform that’s controlled by the communist Chinese government, and which is giving the CCP information on its users …. Okay, let’s ignore all that for a minute and think about how platforms like TikTok might be useful to publishers, despite it all.
- There’s branding and name recognition. Getting your name in front of new eyeballs can be a good thing.
- Go ahead and make those digital dimes. Get some advertising money while you can. As a friend says, “if you’ve got a wave, surf.”
- If you’re a message-driven organization, TikTok provides a chance to get your message out to more people.
- You can collaborate with other brands. But be careful about that. It can also backfire rather severely.
- You can post promotional videos on TikTok.
That last one is the real key, because in this case the publisher gets the customer information, which is the real gold. Publishers can promote workshops or online learning. They can drive traffic to their subscription websites, or to their e-stores.
To make it very simple, publishers should not be creating content for TikTok just to get followers and advertising revenue. That’s a waste of your resources, and it’s a daily grind. You’re not building anything.
Rather, use TikTok (if you can stomach it) as another input to your marketing funnel and create a strategy to drive people from TikTok to your site where you can get the customer information.
Here’s a link to the article Bo Sacks distributed last night.
Fastest-growing news publishers on Tiktok since start of 2023 revealed
