Tucked away at the end of both the last column and this week’s podcast was a piece of news that was breaking at the time. It is still breaking but, like a very slow wave on a very shallow beach, some more of it has now broken. That story was the one we started the year speculating about: the future of TikTok in the US.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
This is a big deal because we are still seeing regular articles reminding us that BookTok is one of the most valuable marketing platforms of the internet age, and we are still seeing bookstores credit it with bringing people back to the joy of physical books in their droves.
Deadlines and Delays
The previous US administration set the clock, er, tick-tocking to a mid-January date by which the company’s owners, ByteDance, were required to divest themselves of the US TikTok platform and ensure that any platform used in the US was not based on the same algorithm as the one used elsewhere. The deadline came and was extended, and that cycle has been repeating, with the most recent deadline due to fall on Wednesday of this week.
Investors Step In
At the start of the week we learned that a deal was in the offing between US and Chinese parties that would see the continued provision of TikTok in the US. Now we have a little more detail. It seems that investors stepping in to run the platform include software giant Oracle and venture capital behemoth Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z, which I always confuse with A24, the cinema studio responsible for giving the world the term “elevated horror”). The full picture has yet to emerge, but TechCrunch has some very interesting information on possible involved parties.
What is clear is that we needn’t switch off when faced with sessions telling us how to use BookTok just yet.
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