Transcript
This was a screen grab of me scrolling through 11 posts on my 4U page. 5 were TikTok shop, 4 were sponsored, and 2 were normal. And as someone who studied probability in grad school, I know that for any truly random distribution, you will get clumping. But nothing about TikTok is truly random. Not even the odds that you're on the toilet right now. So I continued scrolling and tallied the results. Out of 100 videos, 19 were sponsored, 19 were TikTok shop, and the other 62 were normal. That's more than 1 in 3 videos trying to. sell us something. But that's on my main account, which I've been using for years, and the algorithm probably thinks that it's got a better shot of trying to sell me something, better targeting. So I went to my alt account, which I've barely ever scrolled, and out of 115 videos, eight were TikTok shop, 22 were sponsored, and 85 were normal. Totally different breakdown. Only 26% were trying to sell me something, maybe because they think that conversion rates would be lower, because they know less about that account. But here's something else I noticed. On my main account, not one of those posts were political. They know I hate politics. 31 were political, 23 of which either showed or mentioned the new New York City mayor. And I get that that's a big deal right now, but 31 videos for an account that has never once watched through anything political? It's almost like they're trying to make new user me care more about politics. And I bet that analyzing the average sentiment there would be interesting. But then I wanted to compare this to Instagram. Scrolling through 100 videos on my main gave me two sponsored posts and one about politics, which was about the mayor. And on a brand new Instagram account, 100 videos, two sponsored zero politics. Who else misses the old TikTok?
Additional notes
Your Homework: Go and run this experiment for yourself and report back. What percentage of each category are you getting? This can't be just me.
References
- No study references or source links listed in workbook.