Tik Tok beats Google as Most Popular Site — What Does This Mean?

Tik Tok, the Chinese (Bytedance) owned video site is now the number on rated website in the world, beating out Google in February, March and June 2021, and solidly since August to now.

This tells us a lot.

First, it tells us about the dominance of video as a medium of communicating ideas on the web. Video, in fact, now the dominant medium online. Nearly 85% of the content online now is video as opposed to text or photos.

The reason for this is in the palm of your hand — your smart phone.

When Steve Jobs announced the arrival of the first iPhone in 2003, he said this amazing new instrument was really three devices in one:

• It was a iPod for music
• It was a telephone
• It was a connection to the web

Jobs, the creator of the iPhone and the phone revolution missed out on what would turn out to be the biggest game changer — the camera. The inclusion of a camera, and the capacity both to take photos and video, and share them, was almost an afterthought at Apple in designing the phones. But those cameras would go on to change the world.

Until the iPhone, the ability to create videos and movies was a highly restricted, complicated and often expensive endevaour. As a result, only a tiny percent of our population engaged in creating the most powerful and influential medium we had.

The phone democratized the medium — it made it possible for quite literally billions of people to start creating videos or movies at virtually no cost and with almost no effort.

This is amazing. It is an almost unprecedented transfer of power from they few to the many.

Buried out there in the world is almost unlimited media power waiting to be tapped into.

Right now, we still think of the world as being shaped by Fox News or CNN or what we amorphously call ‘the media’. But ‘the media’ is a dinosaur. What is the power of Fox and its 2,654 employees when there are 3.2 billion people in the world who have smart phones.

They are running and they are creating all the content on Tik Tok (and YouTube and Instagram Reels and everywhere else) every day, for free.

But what we could do…. what we could do, is take this incredible resource and focus it.

Focus it.

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