9 ms·

The entertainment value curve: Why TikTok is on fire and Quibi isn’t (2020)

EricE 4y ago
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  - sudden_dystopia 4y ago
causi 4y ago
A non-zero factor were those mysterious-ass commercials that gave you zero information. "Time for a Quibi" doesn't work if you have no idea what the fuck a Quibi is. I saw those ads dozens of times and still had no idea it was a short-form video service until I read an article talking about their bankruptcy.
- mike00632 4y ago
  Also they marketed it as a way to waste time. It was completely disrespectful to their audience and content makers, essentially saying, "do you have some time to kill?! Watch our videos which are not too long to be a commitment." Whereas with TikTok I will gladly sit down and prepare for a two hour session at a time when I'm not commuting or on the toilet. The content is worth it.
- thrashh 4y ago
  I think Quibi sounds terrible too. I don’t think TikTok is much better but you don’t have to be amazing when you’re the first one.
  - tacitusarc 4y ago
    Wasn’t Vine first?
    - thrashh 4y ago
      Yeah but Twitter bought it and then shut it down because they couldn’t make any money from it
kbelder 4y ago
Well, Quibi was just doomed. The more interesting question, to me, is why TikTok and not Vine? Was it just timing? I suspect it was the recommendation engine.
- zacwest 4y ago
  Vine also limited you to a very small video at 6 seconds. There's not a lot of breathing room for creativity in such a tiny window of time.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jandrese 4y ago
    This was it IMHO. Vine was a bit too restrictive. While there is a case for very short video it makes production hard and you end up starved for content. I think Vine might still be around if they had set the limit at 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. Still tight, but not like a straitjacket.
- mattnewton 4y ago
  Vine didn’t license music the way TikTok did IIRC. That gave TikTok a core use case tapping into kareoke-culture while Vine struggled to find a mainstream audience. Vine also had a slightly-shorter format with less creator tools, and altogether this meant the platform was much more constrained I think. Also, from the outside at least, it felt like twitter just gave up with Vine (and periscope) after a single attempt at monetization. I suspect some of the other difference was the huge bankroll for user acquisition that TikTok had and the resulting patience around monetization? But I don’t know if that is true.
  - beauzero 4y ago
    Still bummed about not being able to watch storm chasers on Periscope anymore. It was a great format specifically for that...that and the guy that fed raccoons dog food on his back porch at night. Youtube just isn't quite as easy to find all the storm chaser feeds during a hurricane.
Cerium 4y ago
TikTok has a catchy name that aligns with the fast action short content. This is the nth time I have googled Quibi to find out what it was, and been surprised that it was an American company. It sure doesn't sound like it.
- falcolas 4y ago
  Some entrepreneurs get too hung up on having a name that’s mostly unique in google searches. I’ve seen too many stupid names that you’ll forget before googling.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fdgsdfogijq 4y ago
Its the recommendation engine. TikTok is exposing both Instagram and Youtube as pure garbage. They clearly tuned their content machines to make the most money and censor the most content. The gap was wide open for someone to actually create a recommendation engine that rewards real grass roots content creators and gives users the content they want to see. This is a classic example of capitalism, the monopolistic technical choices of Google/FB/other media are getting torched
- mattnewton 4y ago
  As someone interests in recommendation systems I really need to spend some time with Tiktok fans and understand this. I spent about three weeks with the app and did not find almost any engaging content. The first week was just quickly scrolling past what looked like highschool girls dancing, then eventually I found some political content I was interested in watching to get a sense of the zeitgeist and tried engaging with that but it was buried again by reaction videos and more dances. I’ve seen TikTok content I am interested in show up recycled as YouTube shorts so I know it exists, but I was never able to find it on the platform. Universally I hear this recommendation engine is the best in the business. Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup, is a few weeks just too short of a time to build up what they need, or am I just a weirdo?
  - bsaul 4y ago
    when did you try ? i had the feeling the number of "serious" videos has increased a lot in the past months. Or, maybe i just got bored watching pretty women dance after a while, and the algorithm detected it and adjusted.
  - belval 4y ago
    > Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup Honestly from the description you wrote it just does not seem like TikTok is the right platform for you. What I like about it is the light-heartedness of it, I don't see political content at all and I wouldn't really be interested if I got any as it's a pretty terrible platform for news and hot takes. Instead, I get cooking/funny/cute/surreal meme videos that match the Gen Z humor. It distracts me from gloomy Twitter/Facebook feeds. It's not an app for serious content, it's a dopamine treadmill.
bawolff 4y ago
The premise of article seems to be that quibi had good production value but bad social value. I watched some quibi shows. Quality was poor. It didn't know what it wanted to be and it showed. The medium was utilized poorly and just felt annoying. I dont think the problem was just poor social value. Quibi was shit all around.
- tlogan 4y ago
  Yes-I really tried to watch Quibi shows and they were really bad. Or better to say: nah… If they made something like Moon Knight or Peacemaker they will be fine: even with ackward implementation.
jvanderbot 4y ago
Tiktok is full of cringy sing along by 18 year olds trying to be hot. quibi was marketed as short adult programming. They had Bill Burr. Bill Burr can't compete with dancing teenagers and I think he'd admit that.
- hello_friendos 4y ago
- kevinventullo 4y ago
  TikTok also has Bill Burr…
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    now
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
nkotov 4y ago
Too much focus on stars like Trevor Noah that gen Z / millennial didn't care about. Too "production"-y and "professional". Majority of content on TikTok feels more down to earth and relatable and actually interesting. It's the same reason why Vine was popular back in the day, it just felt more human instead of another entertainment product.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Authenticity does not scale. Neither does the kind of zany creativity that produces viral content.
  - jklm 4y ago
    Isn’t tiktok gaining ground against instagram?
    - BitwiseFool 4y ago
      I'm talking about scaling challenges around the studio system for generating content. Top-down creativity can not scale to meet the throughput of decentralized user-generated content.
luhn 4y ago
Quibi was a misguided venture from the start, and I think it was obvious to anybody existing in the "young" social media world. 10 minutes is way too long to get the same instant gratification as TikTok, Instagram, et al. It's also too long to mindlessly pickup during the short breaks during the day: Walking down the hallway, waiting in line at Starbucks, commercial break on Hulu, etc. So it has none of the benefits of TikTok, but is artificially constrained to only ten minute episodes, hampering what story can be told in a single episode. It also means you can't license TV shows or movies to bolster the library. Even with a billion dollars, competing with the original content of streaming services like Netflix that have existed for a decade is a tall order.
- hakfoo 4y ago
  I didn't think of Quibi as trying to be a "social" media. The goal seemed to be to create a new channel for commercial media. There's a valid argument for "conventional media is not ideal for consumption on your phone." The content isn't really mixed or targeted for the device. You can make a strong case for developing media specifically for the format-- like how TV eventually begat the sitcom and 60-minute cop drama. This, however, has to be an iterative process. They blew straight past MVP and went full "here's a finished complete product that we just know people will pay $10 per month for without adequately explaining it to them." They could probably have survived if they had started a lot smaller, and probably went to a different monetization model. For something like this, you almost have to give the store away for a year or two, just to get real user feedback and develop buzz. Maybe when you instrument up users, you find out that 10 minutes is the wrong timeslice, and 6 or 16 flies better. Maybe some content proves to be more suited to the form. Once you have a base of people actually discussing your content, maybe a price plan akin to old Crunchyroll, where the back catalog was ad-supported, and you had to pay to see new content in a timely fashion. You can't expect to sell people on 10 bucks a month when you haven't established your content credentials. I also suspect Covid did a number on some of their key target markets; the idea of "I have 10 minutes to kill and my phone is the only screen choice" dovetails very well with public transport and office lunch breaks, both of which were mysteriously flattened in the spring of 2020. If you're going to be locked down, you may as well be locked down around the 40-inch TV and watch full movies.
bena 4y ago
I guessed it was because you needed to essentially be a studio to produce Quibis and you could create a TikTok from the app. And yep. That's a large part of it. If you want to succeed socially, you have to allow the masses to be generators of content. YouTube and Twitch were grown along these principles. Now they're more on the produced side of things, but in the early days, it was grab a camera and go. And you can still get a lot of mileage out of that setup on those platforms.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
The name Quibi sounds like a Chinese streaming site for movies. I think that might have an effect on a western audience. Ironically it was backed by Jeff Katzenburg while TikTok, the actual Chinese platform became successful. Branding is important
- Leary 4y ago
  People had no qualms with the name when millions installed Quibi for free trials during the start of Covid, the problem is they didn't want to pay for it.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > The name Quibi sounds like a Chinese streaming site for movies. Not even a little bit. The legal syllables in which a Q is followed by a U are qu and que. If you asked me "which language was the name 'Quibi' made up in?"[1], my first guess would be English, followed by maybe French or Spanish. [1] Actually, this sounds like a fun game.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    I should note that I forgot quan and qun.
overtonwhy 4y ago
TikTok is on fire because it shows young girls dancing in their underpants. That's it.
- coverband 4y ago
  Guess you didn't watch the viral video of the guy on skates with a drink in his hand, listening to Fleetwood Mac...
- kjeetgill 4y ago
  Haha, if that was true snapchat's discover stories would be more popular. Hit: it's not.
WaitWaitWha 4y ago
>to my knowledge, there’s never been a successful media-tech firm founded by people in their sixties. The young brain is crazy, creative, and willing to work 80 hours a week, as young people think they’ll live forever. People in their sixties are not blessed/cursed with any of these things, which makes them decent leaders, great mentors, and shitty entrepreneurs. Maybe you do not see us because we work smarter, not harder. Maybe, we no longer need to be in the limelight like a "young brain". We can just sit back, hire "young people" to be gung-ho, and enjoy providing guidance, and the fruits of our labour. (edit: love to hear the elucidation why the down-vote.)
deanCommie 4y ago
Quibi failed because it misunderstood the "Waiting in line for a few minutes, let me watch something quick model". In a 5 minute lineup waiting for a sandwich, these users want to scroll through 100 TikTok videos, pause on 10, and give each one 20 seconds. Not watch one (or maybe even HALF of one) Quibi episode that requires full attention to the plot, "appreciation" of the "high production" values, and constant phone adjustment to make the most of the show filmed for multiple orientations. 10 minute Quibi episodes felt groundbreaking to the old hollywood guard that thought they were being innovative against 2 hour movies, but it was hopelessly conservative against the actual competition from TikTok and Instagram Reels. This is not the indictment of our attention-deficit culture that many would claim that it is. Films continue to be popular - in theaters and at home. People continue to binge watch dozens of hours of Television. Books are as popular as ever - even in their legacy dead tree format. But the "short video" genre is a completely different concept, and the old guard missed it. (Just as Ballmer & co missed what was special about iPhone and iPad)
ciropantera 4y ago
Slightly unrelated but it's crazy to see how fast the sentiment towards Netflix has changed. This article from 2 years ago refers to Netflix as the platform everybody loves who can't do no wrong. I don't think I have read any positive articles about Netflix written in the last 6 months or so.
gumby 4y ago
What I love about this essay, and essays like it, is the ignorance of history (not the author's necessarily) that it points to. Stage and cinema were social events. You could go alone but usually you would not. The amount of inventory was small so everybody ended up talking about it; word of mouth could make or break a show. When TV was introduced critics mourned this. There was so much more content that it couldn't build community. And the stupid kids just watched TV...with their friends. Even if their friends weren't with them they talked on the phone and of course saw each other at school. Eventually the number of channels exploded, and people started watching online. And now the media pundits mourned the "water cooler conversation" that would no longer happen because people were no longer watching from the small set of shows (which had previously been considered too big). Both these critics and the essay author understand that social interactions are what people want, but the critics have always been stuck in the past.
greg7gkb 4y ago
Related: The Foundering podcast did a great series on the origins of TikTok and how it evolved from a Silicon Valley startup into the juggernaut it is today. https://open.spotify.com/show/6hETi9oBd26vc0bRgXYN5W?si=d87d9179b42c4182 https://open.spotify.com/show/6hETi9oBd26vc0bRgXYN5W?si=d87d... See season 2.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago
- sudden_dystopia 4y ago

A non-zero factor were those mysterious-ass commercials that gave you zero information. "Time for a Quibi" doesn't work if you have no idea what the fuck a Quibi is. I saw those ads dozens of times and still had no idea it was a short-form video service until I read an article talking about their bankruptcy.

mike00632 4y ago
Also they marketed it as a way to waste time. It was completely disrespectful to their audience and content makers, essentially saying, "do you have some time to kill?! Watch our videos which are not too long to be a commitment." Whereas with TikTok I will gladly sit down and prepare for a two hour session at a time when I'm not commuting or on the toilet. The content is worth it.
thrashh 4y ago
I think Quibi sounds terrible too. I don’t think TikTok is much better but you don’t have to be amazing when you’re the first one.
- tacitusarc 4y ago
  Wasn’t Vine first?
  - thrashh 4y ago
    Yeah but Twitter bought it and then shut it down because they couldn’t make any money from it

kbelder 4y ago

Well, Quibi was just doomed. The more interesting question, to me, is why TikTok and not Vine? Was it just timing? I suspect it was the recommendation engine.

zacwest 4y ago
Vine also limited you to a very small video at 6 seconds. There's not a lot of breathing room for creativity in such a tiny window of time.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 4y ago
  This was it IMHO. Vine was a bit too restrictive. While there is a case for very short video it makes production hard and you end up starved for content. I think Vine might still be around if they had set the limit at 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. Still tight, but not like a straitjacket.
mattnewton 4y ago
Vine didn’t license music the way TikTok did IIRC. That gave TikTok a core use case tapping into kareoke-culture while Vine struggled to find a mainstream audience. Vine also had a slightly-shorter format with less creator tools, and altogether this meant the platform was much more constrained I think. Also, from the outside at least, it felt like twitter just gave up with Vine (and periscope) after a single attempt at monetization. I suspect some of the other difference was the huge bankroll for user acquisition that TikTok had and the resulting patience around monetization? But I don’t know if that is true.
- beauzero 4y ago
  Still bummed about not being able to watch storm chasers on Periscope anymore. It was a great format specifically for that...that and the guy that fed raccoons dog food on his back porch at night. Youtube just isn't quite as easy to find all the storm chaser feeds during a hurricane.

Cerium 4y ago

TikTok has a catchy name that aligns with the fast action short content. This is the nth time I have googled Quibi to find out what it was, and been surprised that it was an American company. It sure doesn't sound like it.

falcolas 4y ago
Some entrepreneurs get too hung up on having a name that’s mostly unique in google searches. I’ve seen too many stupid names that you’ll forget before googling.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fdgsdfogijq 4y ago

Its the recommendation engine. TikTok is exposing both Instagram and Youtube as pure garbage. They clearly tuned their content machines to make the most money and censor the most content. The gap was wide open for someone to actually create a recommendation engine that rewards real grass roots content creators and gives users the content they want to see. This is a classic example of capitalism, the monopolistic technical choices of Google/FB/other media are getting torched

mattnewton 4y ago
As someone interests in recommendation systems I really need to spend some time with Tiktok fans and understand this. I spent about three weeks with the app and did not find almost any engaging content. The first week was just quickly scrolling past what looked like highschool girls dancing, then eventually I found some political content I was interested in watching to get a sense of the zeitgeist and tried engaging with that but it was buried again by reaction videos and more dances. I’ve seen TikTok content I am interested in show up recycled as YouTube shorts so I know it exists, but I was never able to find it on the platform. Universally I hear this recommendation engine is the best in the business. Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup, is a few weeks just too short of a time to build up what they need, or am I just a weirdo?
- bsaul 4y ago
  when did you try ? i had the feeling the number of "serious" videos has increased a lot in the past months. Or, maybe i just got bored watching pretty women dance after a while, and the algorithm detected it and adjusted.
- belval 4y ago
  > Is there some social signal they aren’t getting from my setup Honestly from the description you wrote it just does not seem like TikTok is the right platform for you. What I like about it is the light-heartedness of it, I don't see political content at all and I wouldn't really be interested if I got any as it's a pretty terrible platform for news and hot takes. Instead, I get cooking/funny/cute/surreal meme videos that match the Gen Z humor. It distracts me from gloomy Twitter/Facebook feeds. It's not an app for serious content, it's a dopamine treadmill.

bawolff 4y ago

The premise of article seems to be that quibi had good production value but bad social value. I watched some quibi shows. Quality was poor. It didn't know what it wanted to be and it showed. The medium was utilized poorly and just felt annoying. I dont think the problem was just poor social value. Quibi was shit all around.

tlogan 4y ago
Yes-I really tried to watch Quibi shows and they were really bad. Or better to say: nah… If they made something like Moon Knight or Peacemaker they will be fine: even with ackward implementation.

jvanderbot 4y ago

Tiktok is full of cringy sing along by 18 year olds trying to be hot. quibi was marketed as short adult programming. They had Bill Burr. Bill Burr can't compete with dancing teenagers and I think he'd admit that.

hello_friendos 4y ago
kevinventullo 4y ago
TikTok also has Bill Burr…
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  now

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

nkotov 4y ago

Too much focus on stars like Trevor Noah that gen Z / millennial didn't care about. Too "production"-y and "professional". Majority of content on TikTok feels more down to earth and relatable and actually interesting. It's the same reason why Vine was popular back in the day, it just felt more human instead of another entertainment product.

BitwiseFool 4y ago
Authenticity does not scale. Neither does the kind of zany creativity that produces viral content.
- jklm 4y ago
  Isn’t tiktok gaining ground against instagram?
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    I'm talking about scaling challenges around the studio system for generating content. Top-down creativity can not scale to meet the throughput of decentralized user-generated content.

luhn 4y ago

Quibi was a misguided venture from the start, and I think it was obvious to anybody existing in the "young" social media world. 10 minutes is way too long to get the same instant gratification as TikTok, Instagram, et al. It's also too long to mindlessly pickup during the short breaks during the day: Walking down the hallway, waiting in line at Starbucks, commercial break on Hulu, etc. So it has none of the benefits of TikTok, but is artificially constrained to only ten minute episodes, hampering what story can be told in a single episode. It also means you can't license TV shows or movies to bolster the library. Even with a billion dollars, competing with the original content of streaming services like Netflix that have existed for a decade is a tall order.

hakfoo 4y ago
I didn't think of Quibi as trying to be a "social" media. The goal seemed to be to create a new channel for commercial media. There's a valid argument for "conventional media is not ideal for consumption on your phone." The content isn't really mixed or targeted for the device. You can make a strong case for developing media specifically for the format-- like how TV eventually begat the sitcom and 60-minute cop drama. This, however, has to be an iterative process. They blew straight past MVP and went full "here's a finished complete product that we just know people will pay $10 per month for without adequately explaining it to them." They could probably have survived if they had started a lot smaller, and probably went to a different monetization model. For something like this, you almost have to give the store away for a year or two, just to get real user feedback and develop buzz. Maybe when you instrument up users, you find out that 10 minutes is the wrong timeslice, and 6 or 16 flies better. Maybe some content proves to be more suited to the form. Once you have a base of people actually discussing your content, maybe a price plan akin to old Crunchyroll, where the back catalog was ad-supported, and you had to pay to see new content in a timely fashion. You can't expect to sell people on 10 bucks a month when you haven't established your content credentials. I also suspect Covid did a number on some of their key target markets; the idea of "I have 10 minutes to kill and my phone is the only screen choice" dovetails very well with public transport and office lunch breaks, both of which were mysteriously flattened in the spring of 2020. If you're going to be locked down, you may as well be locked down around the 40-inch TV and watch full movies.

bena 4y ago

I guessed it was because you needed to essentially be a studio to produce Quibis and you could create a TikTok from the app. And yep. That's a large part of it. If you want to succeed socially, you have to allow the masses to be generators of content. YouTube and Twitch were grown along these principles. Now they're more on the produced side of things, but in the early days, it was grab a camera and go. And you can still get a lot of mileage out of that setup on those platforms.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

The name Quibi sounds like a Chinese streaming site for movies. I think that might have an effect on a western audience. Ironically it was backed by Jeff Katzenburg while TikTok, the actual Chinese platform became successful. Branding is important

Leary 4y ago
People had no qualms with the name when millions installed Quibi for free trials during the start of Covid, the problem is they didn't want to pay for it.
thaumasiotes 4y ago
> The name Quibi sounds like a Chinese streaming site for movies. Not even a little bit. The legal syllables in which a Q is followed by a U are qu and que. If you asked me "which language was the name 'Quibi' made up in?"[1], my first guess would be English, followed by maybe French or Spanish. [1] Actually, this sounds like a fun game.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  I should note that I forgot quan and qun.

overtonwhy 4y ago

TikTok is on fire because it shows young girls dancing in their underpants. That's it.

coverband 4y ago
Guess you didn't watch the viral video of the guy on skates with a drink in his hand, listening to Fleetwood Mac...
kjeetgill 4y ago
Haha, if that was true snapchat's discover stories would be more popular. Hit: it's not.

WaitWaitWha 4y ago

>to my knowledge, there’s never been a successful media-tech firm founded by people in their sixties. The young brain is crazy, creative, and willing to work 80 hours a week, as young people think they’ll live forever. People in their sixties are not blessed/cursed with any of these things, which makes them decent leaders, great mentors, and shitty entrepreneurs. Maybe you do not see us because we work smarter, not harder. Maybe, we no longer need to be in the limelight like a "young brain". We can just sit back, hire "young people" to be gung-ho, and enjoy providing guidance, and the fruits of our labour. (edit: love to hear the elucidation why the down-vote.)

deanCommie 4y ago

Quibi failed because it misunderstood the "Waiting in line for a few minutes, let me watch something quick model". In a 5 minute lineup waiting for a sandwich, these users want to scroll through 100 TikTok videos, pause on 10, and give each one 20 seconds. Not watch one (or maybe even HALF of one) Quibi episode that requires full attention to the plot, "appreciation" of the "high production" values, and constant phone adjustment to make the most of the show filmed for multiple orientations. 10 minute Quibi episodes felt groundbreaking to the old hollywood guard that thought they were being innovative against 2 hour movies, but it was hopelessly conservative against the actual competition from TikTok and Instagram Reels. This is not the indictment of our attention-deficit culture that many would claim that it is. Films continue to be popular - in theaters and at home. People continue to binge watch dozens of hours of Television. Books are as popular as ever - even in their legacy dead tree format. But the "short video" genre is a completely different concept, and the old guard missed it. (Just as Ballmer & co missed what was special about iPhone and iPad)

ciropantera 4y ago

Slightly unrelated but it's crazy to see how fast the sentiment towards Netflix has changed. This article from 2 years ago refers to Netflix as the platform everybody loves who can't do no wrong. I don't think I have read any positive articles about Netflix written in the last 6 months or so.

gumby 4y ago

What I love about this essay, and essays like it, is the ignorance of history (not the author's necessarily) that it points to. Stage and cinema were social events. You could go alone but usually you would not. The amount of inventory was small so everybody ended up talking about it; word of mouth could make or break a show. When TV was introduced critics mourned this. There was so much more content that it couldn't build community. And the stupid kids just watched TV...with their friends. Even if their friends weren't with them they talked on the phone and of course saw each other at school. Eventually the number of channels exploded, and people started watching online. And now the media pundits mourned the "water cooler conversation" that would no longer happen because people were no longer watching from the small set of shows (which had previously been considered too big). Both these critics and the essay author understand that social interactions are what people want, but the critics have always been stuck in the past.

greg7gkb 4y ago

Related: The Foundering podcast did a great series on the origins of TikTok and how it evolved from a Silicon Valley startup into the juggernaut it is today. https://open.spotify.com/show/6hETi9oBd26vc0bRgXYN5W?si=d87d9179b42c4182 https://open.spotify.com/show/6hETi9oBd26vc0bRgXYN5W?si=d87d... See season 2.