Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Leeds and coauthor of a book on TikTok, told me.
"TikTok, when it came into the international Western market, was already pretty well established as a short-video platform," D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Leeds and coauthor of a book on TikTok, told me. "It had been competing with other fairly well-established short-video platforms in China for some time. Some of the strategies that it developed had already been road tested in China. There wasn't as much of a learning curve that Instagram — and also, to an extent, YouTube — has faced in trying to replicate and compete with some of the things that make TikTok so unique and so appealing to its audiences."