In 2005, the World Wide Web turned 15, and both Facebook and YouTube launched us into the age of the platform. In 2020, Facebook and YouTube turned 15, and it does seem that we have hit another inflection point. TikTok, built from the ground up as a mobile-first, vertically oriented, behavior-modification exercise highlights YouTube’s legacy as a search-driven, horizontally oriented, desktop video repository. For its part, Facebook is trying to regain traction in the post-millennial demographic. The latest news — that a kid-focused Instagram would do for Facebook what Joe Camel did for cigarettes — shows how important audience acquisition has become at multi-billion-user scale. At a time when congressional hearings multiply, content businesses struggle with the realities of post-fact, polarized civic discourse, and “privacy” appears to be working as an Apple positioning anchor, what might we see from the platforms going forward?
1) How will entertainment and interpersonal connection separate?
TikTok is not built as a social graph. Growth for ByteDance does not rely on users getting their friends to sign up, which was Facebook’s growth hack back in the 2000s. Snapchat does not spread memes as its primary focus. Going forward, we might see a division of labor similar to the pre-Internet era: AT&T kept people connected while Disney and Viacom kept them entertained.
2) What’s the next hardware frontier?
Amazon has considerable traction with Alexa but no social media component. Facebook has invested heavily in virtual reality, with only nice markets adopting the technology. Apple is poised to offer glasses; Google could do so again. Google appears to be focusing its automotive efforts on self-driving, whereas Apple’s Project Titan remains super-secret. Self-driving is reported to be in the works, but it would be no surprise if instead we saw a dramatically upscaled CarPlay, essentially turning the car into a peripheral. A partnership between Tesla and, say, Facebook would be a surprise but not illogical. Amazon just launched household drones along with robots that integrate Alexa. In short, watches, glasses/goggles, bots, and automobiles could each help launch the internet platforms into new directions.
3) How do Chinese apps fare?
As we saw last month, Chinese Internet app companies are being focused by their country’s government, and the trend continues on a weekly basis. At the same time, enormous adjacent markets await. Well over a year ago the venture investor Turner Novak listed several product extensions TikTok could plausibly undertake given ByteDance’s existing competencies in steering consumer behavior. These included:
Longer-form videos
Music streaming
Gaming
Consumer finance
Education (note the attention to tutoring services in he Chinese governments recalibration of consumer-facing tech companies)
Messaging
News feeds
Enterprise software (a homegrown Slack competitor for China?)
Cloud hosting
Handsets
In-app purchasing of both virtual (such as badges) and physical assets (foods used in a cooking demo)
4) What can the US apps expand into?
Facebook tried and failed to launch a cryptocurrency. YouTube is trying to be Comcast on some days and NBC/Universal on others. Amazon owns NFL broadcast rights. Google is reportedly trying to sell search tools to ByteDance. Apple has a credit card that, combined with the brand’s emphasis on trust, could open doors into other financial services. (Such a move would support the company’s efforts to expand beyond hardware revenue.) It’s a broad brush, I realize, but I believe firms with more diverse revenue streams (Amazon) will fare better than pure-play advertising companies that traffic only in attention.
5) How will regulation play out?
Will Facebook be forced to divest WhatsApp and/or Instagram? What about Google and YouTube? Amazon and Twitch? 10+ years is a long time after the acquisition to unwind a deal, but there could be other dramatic departures from current practice. Short of divestiture, cross-app integration might be curtailed, for example: log into Facebook, but nothing you do there is transferred into Instagram, including the identity management process.
6) What’s ahead for content moderation?
It’s abundantly clear that social media personalities with big followings play by different rules than the rest of us. It’s also clear that mis- and disinformation campaigns grow more sophisticated and consequential every year. YouTube just took down a bunch of anti-vaccine videos, for example, but where does the platforms’ responsibility start and stop? In an age of highly politicized efforts to discredit science-based public policy as elitist attacks on personal freedom, what counts as free speech? In what venues? Apart from the enormous hairball of fact-checking, misogyny and racism continue to plague every major social media platform. Twitch is rolling out new tools, for example, while YouTube can’t define what hate speech is at the same time that the platform prohibits it.
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