TikTok giveth features, and TikTok taketh features. It’s nothing personal, it’s just business. The social media titan has been looking for ways to bring in more than just advertising cash, such as an in-app shopping feature and by putting its tech on sale. Now it plans to let content creators put themselves on sale through a video commission feature that looks a lot like Cameo.
TikTok likes to borrow, too
As we said, the feature is remarkably similar to Cameo, a platform that lets users pay creators (often celebrities) to film a short video specifically for themselves or for a friend as a gift. What would be cooler than having Kevin Conroy (aka Batman) sing you happy birthday, after all? Plus, with pretty much every other social media platform borrowing inspiration from TikTok, we think it’s fair that it does some borrowing of its own.
TikTok is calling its own version ‘Shoutouts”, and it works in pretty much the same way bar a few spins. For one, rather than by paying with cash directly, you’ll pay creators with TikTok coins, the platform’s in-app currency. Because everything needs an in-app currency these days.
Secondly, though we haven’t actually seen the feature at work yet, we’d imagine creators would have the means to be a few ticks more creative with their videos than just staring into a face cam and reciting a few lines, thanks to the app’s plethora of editing tools. This also means that users can get a lot more creative with their video requests. How this will translate to cost remains to be seen.
Something else TikTok has over Cameo is its range of faces. See, while Jack Black and Will Smith aren’t available on Cameo, they are pretty active on TikTok, so having them and similar famous faces in its arsenal could bode well for the newer app.
The process of requesting, paying for and receiving a shoutout can, according to Engadget, take up to a week or longer. This is largely because each request and commissioned video needs to be reviewed to make sure it’s not hiding any *ahem* mature content in it.
We’re not sure when Shoutouts will land on the app worldwide, it’s currently being tested in Turkey and Dubai. But chances are, like most things TikTok does, it’ll be a roaring success for the app.
