Is it just pure market share from marketing efforts? Is it upfront investment to keep like major server requirements or something running?
To me, who knows nothing, it seems like an app that just uses native features on your phone (camera for example) would be easy enough to replicate/produce. So why is Snap or TikTok such powerhouses?
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The value is not in the technical aspect (more or less) but in the comunity that a platform has.
Anyway, tiktok has an impressive algorithm and the ease of use of making videos is unparalleled.
they gather a lot of users data from behind the scenes, those data can be sold to advertising companies to better tailor their ad targets. The more users they have = the more data they have, thus the more valuable they’ll be.
those data don’t even have to be something personally identifying, even just your habit in using the app is enough.
The value is in the number of people using the platform. With more people engaging for longer = more opportunities to show advertisements = more money an advertiser is willing to pay the social media.
For TikTok in particular, their algorithm can tailor the content that you want to see, keeping you on the platform. In addition, since they know what you like, they can show you relevant ads that in theory increase the chance that the person seeing the ad will buy the product, making an advertising spot there more valuable.
Value of an app isn’t just the tech being used or even what a consumer pays to use it.
The value of an app lies in how many people are using it and how well that app can be used to market things or get tasks completed.
For example, Snapchat got started pretty cheaply (compared to apps today). The developers probably only really spent a few hundred hours writing the code to make the app work. The servers the app used probably also only cost a little bit (compared to now).
However, Snapchat saw a rapid explosion of users. All users who they could advertise to or sell features to. That user base is what’s providing the company value.
In the case of something else, like Microsoft Excel, that makes business tasks more efficient, their value is determined by the value of the time they save. For example, companies would’ve spent hundreds of man hours to keep track of budgets before Excel. But now that Excel is a thing, each and every company using it is saving on thousands of hours worth of time.
There’s an old meme out there that says that if you aren’t paying for it, you’re not the customer you’re the product. Nearly all social media companies derive their value and make money by monetizing their user base. This can be anything from allowing businesses to directly target users with ads to selling user data to third parties.
I don’t think I can edit my first post, I understand how things like Snap and TikTok and Facebook get money from data and usage and ads. Just wondering more like why is Snap for example so successful, it seems to me – a layperson – very basic. Maybe it’s not. I was just wondering if it’s more of like “you’d need $1m to even host that many people to begin with” or something like that.
How can a billboard in Times Square nyc be so valuable? Because there are millions of people looking at it. Most tech value is about advertising. And any popular app will have lots of people looking. This is the value. Not to take away from the tech, it has to actually work and be neat enough to attract people.
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