If you’ve opened TikTok recently, you’ve likely seen an ad for a product sold in the new, in-app TikTok Shop, which officially launched in the US last September. In fact, you’ve probably seen the same TikTok Shop ad multiple times. With a sigh, you swipe away, but after a few swipes, it’s there again.
judged by complaint dispersed Over Internet related to advertisement, people are not fans of ads interrupting the flow of endless scrolling. In a series of unscientific tests using my TikTok account, I saw about five or six ads for every 20 videos. Not all of them were ads for store products — about half the time they were good old-fashioned sponsored ads from big brands like Sephora or Amazon, distinguishable by their professional polish and lack of an orange shopping cart icon at the bottom that directs users to the product page.
The objections about TikTok Shop ads center not only on how many there are (scrolling through your Instagram Stories feed, you’ll also see tons of ads) but how often you see the same ad. The TikTok algorithm seems to have chosen the product for me This is collagen peptide powder – especially through This ad A young-looking woman claims to be around 50 years old. I see it so often that it feels like I’m stuck in a social media ad prison. Why are these TikTok ads suddenly driving us all crazy?
Pushy ads are crucial to TikTok Shop’s business model
One thing is for sure: TikTok must be paying close attention to how often shop ads are bothering users and affecting traffic. TikTok declined to share details with Vox about how the shop ads were served, who saw which ads and how often they appeared.
Rui Ma, a tech analyst at TechBuzz China, said internal reports at Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, believe that 8 to 10 percent of the app experience could be commerce-related content before users start leaving, “presumably mostly hard data and some management.” based on a combination of insights,” he told Vox in an email.
“I would personally be surprised if TikTok didn’t use this number as a guide to get started,” Ma said, “but it’s possible that Chinese people are more tolerant of advertising and the number may be too high for Americans.”
Another sure thing is that social media is an advertising business. Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram $134.9 billion Revenue last year, of which $131.9 billion came from advertising. TikTok, which is much newer in the US and has a much smaller number of users than Meta’s app. $8.75 billion It makes every store sale in addition to advertising revenue last year’s commission.
Importantly, if the TikTok Shop does indeed launch in the US, TikTok will sit on a trove of consumer data collected directly from users.
All major social media companies serve targeted ads to their users. Some apps collect data based on what you put in your profile or your interactions and behavior in the app. Until recently, they could easily see what other websites you visited or what apps you used, but that became much more difficult when Apple started requiring all apps on iOS to ask users if they wanted to opt out of app tracking. most people don’t say, which did a number on effective ad targeting, causing brands to buy fewer ads. Facebook said it lost about $10 billion in ad revenue after Apple’s privacy feature was introduced.
With a built-in e-commerce marketplace, TikTok can capture first-party data about users’ shopping habits at home — no need to track them across the Internet. “TikTok Shop is a huge ad measurement game,” says Garrett Johnson, marketing professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
TikTok’s advertising strategy isn’t exactly subtle, but Juozas Kaziukenas, an e-commerce expert who founded business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, argues that this is why TikTok Shop has been successful. “I think platforms like Facebook and Instagram were never willing to overwhelm users’ feeds with it [shopping] Content to start the platform,” he said.
TikTok is willing, perhaps because it’s already known as the place where people are looking to scoop up viral products. An e-marketer survey from last February, before the launch of TikTok Shop, found that the top places American consumers started their online product searches were Amazon and Walmart — but TikTok created third place.
Could TikTok Shop’s aggressive, repetitive ads backfire?
The aggressiveness of TikTok Shop ads could potentially be temporary, as the company monitors whether they’re losing users or whether time spent on the app is decreasing. But that may not be the case — the data may show TikTok that, for all its complaints, people are still as addicted to the app as ever.
Ma, the tech analyst, doesn’t think the repeat is intentional, but “probably more of an ad inventory issue,” he says. If there are not yet a large number of shop advertisers, this can affect how often you see the same ad, or, if the target audience is fairly small, it can also increase the likelihood of repetition.
Yet the ad barrage is perhaps particularly difficult for TikTok because the app was long praised for its supposedly magical page for you, a feed that tailored to each user’s interests and quirks. While Facebook is stereotyped as the place for your boomer parents to post, Instagram for browsing your friends’ vacation photos, and X (formerly Twitter) for news and incessant discourse, TikTok fans often express a sense of pride for your carefully trained novel. , feed to show entertainment content. The TikTok Shop ad shatters this illusion.
“I think someone called it Enshittification of social platforms,” Kaziukenas said, referring to a term coined by journalist Cory Doctor to describe the tendency for the quality of online platforms to deteriorate over time.
The frequency and intensity of TikTok Shop ads point to an underlying truth as it becomes ubiquitous on almost all social media platforms: apps are increasingly the place to stumble upon things to buy.
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