TikTok has discreetly introduced scoring metrics and a ranking system for its contentcreators according to recent reports. Some of these metrics include a ‘cooperation index’ and a ‘diligence index’ which are used to gauge how enthusiastic the creator is when working with brands and how willing they are to put sponsored products on their feed.
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The documents revealing the information were seen by MarketWatch and were marked as confidential but shared with merchants and brands as part of testing for the company’s commerce platform owned by ByteDance.
Shopping platform
In further examples of disturbing Orwellian doublespeak, creators are also rated on how ‘collaborative’ and ‘consistent’ they are. The whole system is designed to give insights into the marketspace and how effective the creator will be at driving sales in certain product categories.
The report in MarketWatch comments:
These metrics give us a glimpse at a future where a creator’s likelihood of thriving on the uber-popular platform won’t only be tied to their popularity as a TikToker, but as a salesperson as well.
The move from TikTok is part of its move towards becoming a shopping platform as it strives to take a piece of the huge market of online sales and product placement. iTech Post reports:
There's a lot of money going around with these kinds of promotions, so TikTok has launched tools to help with arranging sponsored content. It's a smart move since TikTok will now be able to get a share in the profits, just by becoming the middleman between content creators and businesses.
Influencer marketing
Marketing on social media platforms is a huge industry which is still growing. Traditionally companies and influencers would work and collaborate directly but now TikTok are trying to become the middleman where their role is to identify and rank creators and then match them to potential businesses as a formal part of the app. This means they can channel more of the revenue through the platform and generate more profits. Gizmodo reports:
Most of the purchases that TikTok and other social media apps generate via ads are completed elsewhere. Bringing that commerce onto the apps themselves would create a big revenue stream, and a new field of consumer data ripe for the picking.
The success of this venture remains to be seen as the company’s efforts to bring purchases in-house have received a mixed-response. Last year the company attempted to bring live shopping to users across the UK only to receive widespread backlash, as per MarketWatch.
Sources used:
- MarketWatch 'Exclusive: How TikTok scrutinizes and scores the creators on its shopping platform'
- iTech Post 'TikTok Now Has Hidden Metrics for Scoring Influencers'
- Gizmodo 'TikTok Secretly Scores Influencers on Metrics Like 'Cooperation' and 'Diligence''
