Blogging platforms should take a page from Tiktok's playbook

Tiktok's algorithm works in a way that each piece of content acts almost like its own separate island and can potentially blow up despite the subscriber base of the author

About a year ago Therapada began doing some Tiktok posting. And within the first few posts, for some reason the content started performing pretty well.

As you can see above we were getting 2k+ views on quite a number of posts. And this was all organic off of pretty much a complete cold start. Compare this to our efforts on Youtube… where as you can see below we were lucky if we were getting even 10 views.

And in some cases it was the same content.

So why is is that content can blow up much faster on Tiktok than on Youtube?

Well this was something i’d started researching a fair bit last year. How exactly does the Tiktok algorithm work? And there are actually a lot of videos on this topic like this one.

But my high-level understanding was that basically… you route the video to a potential audience via the hashtags and then based on whether people click on it and watch it to the end or not, it then keeps opening up to a wider and wider base of people that tend to watch videos with that hashtag.

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Note that nowhere in my explanation above did I mention your ‘followers’ playing a critical role. Which makes this very different from how Youtube works.

How Youtube algorithm works (high level)?

Youtube, similar to the way that Facebook and Instagram and most social networks work, spits your content out to your subscribers. And then based on the performance with them, it will then potentially hit some other folks that are not subscribed but tend to watch similar content.

What this means is that on Youtube you are very much limited by how big your subscriber count is.. and it’s much much harder for a video to perform well unless you have a lot of subscribers.

So on Youtube you need to continue to cultivate a single audience, ie. your subscribers. And you shouldn’t stray in too many directions with your content otherwise you risk alienating part of your subscriber base.

This does not happen with Tiktok. You can go from posting videos of hot chics in bikinis and then jump to videos on how to learn programming.. and it doesn’t negatively impact you one bit.

Because you are using different hashtags and thus routing the content differently.

I really love this idea of routing content via hashtags

Meaning that as a creator it opens up your opportunities to extend your audience much more. If I wanna try writing an article about ChatGPT today… i can give it a whirl and try to tap into that audience.

And I don’t need to risk alienating the part of my subscriber base who are rather interested in eCommerce in SEA and don’t wanna see me write about ChatGPT.

It also means that your chances of content virality are much greater as it is on Tiktok. If i just manage to hit a homerun and write a great article about ChatGPT, then it will be shown to increasingly larger audience tiers.

Completely regardless of my subscriber count.

I think the blogging platform that cracks this nut has a ton of potential. Maybe Artifact will?

From what I can tell on SubStack and Medium.. their algorithms offer far less virality potential than the way Tiktok works. And rather they work much more like Youtube.

However it very much peaked my interest when I heard about this startup this week

I have a feeling they may be trying to crack this. We’ll see.

The important way of thinking in my view is not just from the reader’s perspective but also the author’s…. How do I offer creators the ability to tap into popular topics and potentially go viral quickly?

Which then gives them the audience and motivation to double down on their content creation. ie. exactly what happened with Tiktok and why there are just so many creators focused on the platform.