Life in TikTok Limbo
Things are fine for now...but who knows what Gen Z does next?
Everything is back to normal at TikTok. Sort of.
According to data from Tubular Labs - while last weekend’s very brief TikTok outage did result in a pretty steep 36% drop in video uploads (since you literally couldn’t access the app in the US for a few hours) - viewership settled back to normal quite quickly. The biggest effect was a spike in videos about the outage, and TikTok alternatives like RedNote, according to Erica Ortega, Director of Product Marketing, Tubular Labs.
TikTok’s top U.S. video from Jan. 17-19 was its own reaction to the Supreme Court decision, garnering 152 million views, per Tubular
So far in 2025, U.S. TikTok videos are generating an average of 13.35 billion views per day
“TikTok became a trending topic on TikTok,” said Ortega on my podcast this week. Otherwise, “TikTok has been pretty business as usual.”
So now, as we wait for Trump or The Supreme Court or whoever to settle TikTok’s fate (and big companies like Apple literally decide whether to break a real law or listen to the president) it’s anybody’s guess what happens to the TikTok audience.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that people seeking their mindless scrolling dopamine time will just move over to Reels or YouTube Shorts. But it may not be that simple.
For example, as Ortega noted, top TikTok creator Charli D'Amelio spent the lead up to a TikTok shutdown flooding TikTok with hundreds of clips - not moving everything over to Reels or someplace else. First and foremost, she’s a TikToker.
For all of Q4, D'Amelio generated 939 million views, per Tubular
From January 17th to 19th, she uploaded 27 videos and generated 959 million views
While D'Amelio might not be a great example (lots of creators post all over the place), she could be representative of a potential issue - do she and other native TikTokers want to just pick up their acts and followings and go to a clone? Or do something else?
“I think it's like anything else,” said Ortega. “You've got to know your audience. She's catering to kind of a Gen Z audience and they're much more interested in TikTok these days.”
Gen Z seems like the wild card here. Generally speaking, they are heavy YouTube users - but will YouTube Shorts satisfy them if TikTok goes? Do they think of Reels as part of Instagram/Facebook, i.e. old people social media? (One Gen Z person in my life said that Reels is not even close to TikTok).
According to Pew Research, Instagram is in pretty good position among younger users, as is Snap (which could maybe pounce here).
*Pew Research, December 2024
Yet there seem to be clear differences between the Reels and TikTok demos. Adam Faze, who runs Gymnasium - the production studio behind the TikTok hit Boy Room, said on Channels with Peter Kafka that the series does have an audience on Reels as well. But on TikTok, the show’s average viewer is a 22-year-old woman, while on Reels she’s a 35 year old woman.
“The algorithms are very different,” he said. Reels features a lot of rage-inducing content, for instance.
“TikTok has kind of changed the game,” said Ortega. “We know this. I don't know that it's going to be easy to replace it one for one, but at the same time, everyone's trying. So I think what we've seen is that there is a strong preference for the short-form content. You stay engaged, you're not being linked out going elsewhere. You are staying, you are consuming content in this really engrossing way.”
“Everyone loves that [TikTok] algorithm and that's what I think that's the secret sauce,” said Ortega. “Everyone's trying to copy and or replace that. Your guess is as good as ours. Will the platform go away? Will audience find new platforms? Will they go to the YouTube Shorts and Reels? Will product enhancements on those platforms be enough?”
“We're not really sure.“