Don’t build your home on someone else’s land – TikTok, cookies, and Facebook news
Yesterday morning, I saw someone on breakfast TV that I hadn’t thought about for years. They were introduced as a TikToker. When I last thought of them, they were an Instagram influencer. Before this, they were a YouTuber. The internet moves quickly.
Tech giants rise and fall. Words like ‘tweet’ enter the lexicon, and then, like a bird, they fly away, replaced with a big ugly X. Useful platforms and technologies become useless, and vice versa. One day, we’re watching Vine video, the next day, we need a newfound mastery of QR codes to shop in 180-year-old department stores.
That TikToker on morning TV may soon need a new job descriptor, giving that the US Congress is currently working hard to force TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to either sell off the social media platform – unlikely, given it was valued at A$112 billion last year and therefore has a limited number of potential buyers – or face a total ban in America.
A TikTok ban in America would be disastrous – not for TikTok, of course, who are well aware that America no longer rules the world, but for the thousands of people who have built businesses off the back of being on TikTok. Noted 81-year-old TikToker Joe Biden (handle @bidenhq) is all for banning the social media platform, saying of the Bill, “if they pass it, I’ll sign it”.
Given Australia’s trade relationship with China, it’s unlikely we’ll be following suit, but at the moment, it’s unclear what the actual security risks to our country are. So, there may be restrictions. At the moment, relying too heavily on TikTok for your income, or as your main promotional megaphone, is fraught with danger.
Musicians signed to Universal Music Group – the biggest record label on Earth – found this out last month, when a royalty spate between the label and TikTok hit an impasse, and Universal removed its entire catalogue from TikTok, citing the platform’s “greed” when attempting to negotiate music royalty rates.
Artists like Drake and Taylor Swift weren’t fussed, if they noticed at all. But for those smaller artists who rely on the platform to promote their music and build their profile, the move was a body blow.
TikTok smugly noted “the fact is they have chosen to walk away from the powerful support of a platform with well over a billion users that serves as a free promotional and discovery vehicle for their talent”.
This was incredibly shortsighted of Universal — especially given they don’t seem too concerned about the meagre rates other streaming services are paying -– and the rage of its less-established stable of artists, many of whom were instantly and measurably impacted by this unilateral decision, was white hot, and felt instantly.
Peach PRC is an Australian pop artist who was discovered on TikTok, one of many rich ironies you’ll read in the next few paragraphs.
“Universal muted every single song I’ve ever created under them on the very platform they discovered and signed me on,” she wrote to her fans – naturally, on TikTok, because this is the platform that she uses to promote her music career. She does this, because TikTok is the biggest music marketing platform in the world.
Now, Universal Music Group owns a 3.5% share of Spotify, so it doesn’t mind at all that its artists are getting screwed on Spotify to the tune of $0.003 per stream. If Spotify is paying out less royalties, then UMG’s share in the company is worth more.
And it’s precisely because labels like Universal have ceded control of their own financial wellbeing to third-party tech giants like Spotify, that its own artists are being forced to cultivate their own followings and drum up their own promotions.
Tech companies like Apple and Spotify stole control of musical distribution from the major labels, then dictated pissweak royalty rates back to them to partake in the distribution of their own product. Now, because of this batshit arrangement – also seen in various Sopranos plots – the major labels like Universal have less money for things like promotion, so artists are forced to build TikTok followings in order to promote their songs – which are now muted, because TikTok don’t pay high enough royalties, due to the floor set by Spotify.
Also, Spotify owns 16.47% of Chinese company Tencent, which in turn leads a consortium called Concerto Partners that owns a 19.92% stake in Universal Music Group, so it’s hard to say where the money goes, anyway.
A similarly shaky fate awaits Australian media companies who lean too heavily on Facebook and Instagram to spread their news content.
During the week, Meta Australia doubled down on its decision to discontinue the commercial agreements in place with Australian publishers (well, at least the bigger ones) which were struck in 2021 and work to compensate the media companies whose content is shared on Facebook and Instagram.
The Australian Government is doing its best for the media, by threatening to strong-arm these tech giants to pay with the proposed News Media Bargaining Code, but Meta will simply block news content if any such code becomes law.
Meta Australia published a blog post during the week making this stance clear.
They pointed out that Reels, Meta’s latest short-video-play, are reshared 3.5 billion times every day across Facebook and Instagram. They didn’t exist in 2021. The way people use Facebook and Instagram now is markedly different to back in those sepia stained 2021 days.
“Since 2021, there have been significant changes in the types and categories of content that people are consuming across our family of apps,” the Meta blog reads.
“Primarily, we know our audiences come to Facebook to share the ups and downs of life, connect to local community groups, promote their business and or discover entertaining content. Links to news stories are a very small proportion of that — less than 3% percent of the content people see in their Facebook Feed.”
Less than 3%! Not only have Australian media companies relied on the money they received from this strong-armed deal with Meta over the past two years, they still also rely heavily upon Facebook and Instagram as a carrier service for its content, a place to draw clicks, which draws money. They need a different plan.
Meta Australia claims its Facebook feed sent Australian publishers more than 2.3 billion free clicks, worth “an estimated” $115 million worth of value. This will be gone. It also claims news makes up less than 3% of the content seen by its users.
Meta has been invaluable to Australian publishers, it would seem. But according, to Meta, and its 3%, it doesn’t rely on Australian media at all.
We shall see soon, I suppose.
They ended news availability on Facebook in Canada last August. The result? “The number of daily and monthly active users on Facebook in Canada has increased since ending news availability,” Meta reports.
Gulp. So, can’t rely upon TikTok. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. What about Twitter? Remember Twitter?
An internationally recognised brand name, killed by a megalomaniac who crashed a rocket into the Earth this week. At least Google and Facebook kept their main product names when their megalomaniacs changed the company names to Meta and Alphabet. One year after Musk bought Twitter, usage had dropped 16%, misinformation was rife, and the algorithm favoured madness and those X believers who bought verification ticks. If you once relied upon it for your business, you could no longer do so.
There was an immediate exodus to Instagram’s opportunistic but undercooked Threads, but this tapered off, and so far Threads has failed to occupy the same space that Twitter once did. Anyway, it’s owned by Meta. Nothing has replaced it.
Google is currently phasing out third-party cookies, so digital marketers, brand builders, and online stalkers with terrible jazz bands can’t even rely upon the type of creepy targeting that was the bread and butter of internet targeting since such a phrase was coined.
Remember Tila Tequila? It’s a person, not a tequila brand – although she was also one of the internet’s very earliest brands. She had the most MySpace friends in the world at one point. Time ran a profile of her in 2006. She invented this entire thing, but she is forgotten, because MySpace lost 12 years of its history in a data migration error, including the lives of her and her millions of friends. The photographs were burned in the house fire.
With TikTok in trouble, Google cookies crumbling, and Facebook News today’s chip wrapping, you shouldn’t rely on a tech platform to build your brand – at least not without bracing for the inevitable earthquake.
Don’t build your house on someone else’s land.
Enjoy your weekend.
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This week, we held our Mumbrella Retail Marketing Summit.
Check our our special podcast live from the event, featuring chats with TRIBE founder Jules Lund, News Corp Australia’s eCommerce director, Adam Kron, Spotlight Retail Group’s general manager, marketing, Jason Wolff, Microsoft’s advertising and retail media partnerships director, JAPAC, China, John Harvey Faurholt, IKEA Australia’s head of marketing and insights, Kirsten Hasler, and head of communications, Patricia Routledge. Phew!
If a one-on-one chat is more your speed, listen to the latest in one Friday one-on-one series, this week with Fender’s CMO Evan Jones.
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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“a megalomaniac who crashed a rocket into the Earth this week. ” pretty pathetic Mr Jolly, what color is your Rocket?… I’ll wait.
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Great article and all true, but the only other land to build on seems to go under water at high tide.
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