Threat of TikTok ban has creators in search of to construct Instagram following

As TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced hours of grueling questioning from members of Congress in late March, small business owner Chad Spangler watched in frustration.

The bipartisan congressional committee was exploring how TikTok, the massively popular short-form video app owned by China’s ByteDance, could pose a possible privacy and security threat to U.S. consumers.

Representatives grilled Chew in regards to the app’s addictive features, possibly dangerous posts and whether U.S. user data could find yourself within the hands of the Chinese government. Politicians have been threatening a nationwide TikTok ban unless ByteDance sells its stake within the app, a move China said it “strongly” opposed.

But that is not the one source of dissent. Creators comparable to Spangler, who sells his artwork online, are frightened about their livelihood.

TikTok has emerged as a serious piece of the so-called creator economy, which has swelled past $100 billion annually, based on Influencer Marketing Hub. Creators have formed lucrative partnerships with brands, and small business owners comparable to Spangler use the sizable audiences they’ve built on TikTok to advertise their work and drive traffic to their web sites.

“That is the ability of TikTok,” Spangler said, adding that the app drives nearly all of sales for his business, The Good Chad. “They’ve captured the lightning within the bottle that other platforms just have not been in a position to do yet.” 

Spangler has greater than 200,000 followers on TikTok, and his business brought in over $100,000 last 12 months, largely due to his reach there. Influencer Marketing Hub’s data shows that the typical annual income for an influencer within the U.S. was over $108,000, as of 2021.

TikTok has been on a meteoric rise within the U.S., capturing an increasing amount of consumer attention from individuals who used to spend more time on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. In 2021, TikTok topped a billion monthly users. An August Pew Research Center survey found that 67% of teens within the U.S. use TikTok and 16% said they’re on it almost always.

Advertisers are following eyeballs. In response to Insider Intelligence, TikTok now controls 2.3% of the worldwide digital ad market, putting it behind only Google, including YouTube; Facebook, including Instagram; Amazon, and Alibaba.

But with Congress bearing down on TikTok, the app’s role in the longer term of U.S. social media is shaky, as is the sustainability of companies which have come to depend on it.

In April, Montana legislators approved a bill that will ban TikTok from being offered within the state starting next 12 months. TikTok said it opposes the bill, and claims there isn’t any clear way for the state to implement it. 

Congress has already banned the app on government devices, and a few U.S. officials are attempting to forbid its use altogether unless ByteDance divests.

ByteDance didn’t reply to CNBC’s request for comment. 

The White House also threw its support behind a bipartisan Senate bill in March called the RESTRICT Act, which might give the Biden administration the ability to ban platforms comparable to TikTok. But following significant pushback, momentum behind the bill has slowed dramatically. 

As the controversy gains steam, creators are in a state of limbo.

Vivian Tu, who lives in Miami, has been preparing for a possible TikTok ban by working to construct her audience and diversify her content across multiple platforms. 

She began posting on TikTok in 2021 as a fun solution to help answer co-workers’ questions on finance and investing. By the tip of her first week on the platform, she had greater than 100,000 followers. Last 12 months, she left behind a profession on Wall Street and in tech media to pursue content creation full time. 

Tu shares videos in an effort to function a friendly face for financial expertise. Except for posting on TikTok, she uses Instagram, YouTube and Twitter, and she or he also runs a podcast and a weekly newsletter. 

Tu said she began constructing out her presence on multiple platforms before a possible TikTok ban entered the equation, and she or he’s hoping she unfolded her income sources enough to be OK if anything happens. But she called her work on TikTok, where she has greater than 2.4 million followers, her “pride and joy.” 

“It will be an enormous letdown to see the app get banned,” she told CNBC in an interview. 

The highest social media firms within the U.S. are preparing to attempt to fill the vacuum.

Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, has been pumping money into its TikTok copycat, called Reels. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the corporate’s earnings call last month that users are resharing videos over 2 billion times a day, a number that is doubled previously six months, adding “we imagine that we’re gaining share in short-form video.”

Demand for Foster’s stuffies soon outpaced her ability to make them by hand, so she turned to crowdfunding site Kickstarter to lift money to cover manufacturing costs. She raised over $100,000 in her most up-to-date Kickstarter campaign, which got here after three of her videos went viral on TikTok.

“My business would never be where it’s today without TikTok,” she said. 

With the looming threat of a TikTok ban, Foster said she’s been sharing content across Instagram, YouTube and Twitter to attempt to expand her following. At this point, she said, her business would probably survive if TikTok goes away, but it surely could be difficult.

“The audience just is not there, especially for smaller creators,” she said. 

Beyond the cash, Foster is anxious about losing the next she’s worked so hard to construct. She said she’s met “improbable” friends, artists and other small business owners on the platform.

“You are never quite alone. It means quite a bit,” she said. “I’m stressed about potentially losing sales, potentially losing customers, but it surely’s more so just losing a community that’ll break my heart.”

For Spangler, the artist, the controversy surrounding TikTok is exasperating not simply because of what it could mean for his livelihood, but since it seems to him that lawmakers are ill-informed about what the app does.

Spangler recalled one Republican congressman asking Chew in his testimony about whether TikTok connects to a user’s home Wi-Fi network.

“Should you also have a working knowledge of anything technology related, should you watched those hearings, it was just very embarrassing,” Spangler said. “What’s extra frustrating is it seems like that is being potentially taken away from me by individuals who do not know how any of this works.”

Spangler channeled his anger into his artwork. After the hearing, he designed a T-shirt featuring a zombie-like congressman with the phrase, “Does the TikTak use a Wi-Fi?”

He shared a video about it on TikTok and made almost $2,500 from T-shirt sales in lower than two days. 

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