Transcription
Nasdaq big text down today. Let's move on to tech talk. Question: What happens to those influencers, content creators, if the app gets bought out or maybe banned?
Here is Ariadna Jacob, founder and CEO of Influencers, that is a talent management company for Tic Tac, uh, TikTok stars. Ariadna, you know a great deal more about this than I do, I being old enough to be your grandfather, but you've got to tell me more about what your clients, the people you manage, the stars of TikTok, what will they do if TikTok is either banned or bought by Microsoft?
Hi, thank you for having me on. So my clients, you know, this is their primary source of income, and they're going from, you know, sometimes 10, 20 million followers, and you know, advertisers may not see the same return on investment if they leave and go to another platform with a much smaller audience. So, um, you know, the reach they can get sometimes is bigger than network television. So obviously, rebuilding that from scratch can be a daunting task.
Well, are they going to leave TikTok? You know, it's kind of like if, uh, social media is probably the biggest popularity contest in the world, and so you can imagine if you're the most popular kid in school and your parents say you have to leave and move across the country, uh, how you're gonna feel about that, you know, starting over. Of course, sometimes your parents leave for a good reason, and you kind of just have to make the move, but it doesn't make it any easier.
Could your business be truly disrupted? I think our business is constantly changing, so you really have to be resilient, and uh, we're used to change over here. I mean, I saw when TikTok really exploded just in August of last year, and so we're kind of ready for it, and it's just constantly changing. So, you know, it wasn't too long ago that people exploded off of Vine, so
Well, what do you do? What exactly do you do? How do you manage TikTok stars? What do you tell them to do? I think that, you know, they really need to learn how to be, uh, do long-form content, so YouTube is is a great uh platform. I think that hopefully that uh TikTok will get bought by Microsoft, and hopefully Microsoft doesn't kill it off. That's sort of what the creators are a little bit worried about. You know, they're excited about it staying; they just hopefully they want it to uh stay the same. And you know, the TikTok algorithm is really unique in that it amplifies your posts, so you could be a grandmother in Arizona, and you know, you could learn how to do the woe, which is a dance, and then the next day you wake up to 500,000 followers or a million followers. So it's not exactly like other platforms where you have to be the most beautiful bell at the ball; you could be just somebody really creative and talented, and so that's really the spirit of TikTok, and I think that as long as they can keep their community which they've built on TikTok, then they'll be fine.
You know, I guess I I I don't know TikTok very well; I I don't know it at all to be perfectly honest with you, but I'm sure you run into people like me all the time. Do your stars put out a TikTok video every day or more than once a day? Is that what that you're nodding? They do that. Yeah, they the algorithm on TikTok actually wants you the more you post or the more views you can get, and uh, yeah, so sometimes they post three to four times a day, and um, you know, I mean, the best way to describe it: you have a huge audience here, and imagine if you had to go to a new network that was relatively, you know, that wasn't gonna uh have the same amount of reach as you have right now, you know, it would be a little bit, I don't know, how would you feel? Yeah, I wouldn't be happy, and that's the truth; I really would not be happy.
How many stars do you manage? Uh, we manage about 45 content creators. Yeah, I'm 45. Um, and forgive me for asking a typical Stuart Varney question, but do you take a piece of their action? So for 45 stars, they're all earning money; do you take say 10% of what they make? Well, not all of them are are earning money right away, right? So we have creators that I found when they had 10,000 followers; there's this cute little boy and his dad that dance, and I found them when they had about 10,000 followers, and now I think they have 6.5 million on TikTok. It's just a matter of time. You take a piece of their income; they've got six and a half million TikTok follow; you got a piece of that? Yeah, we have a percentage of um, you know, what we can what we can uh what they make basically. So so you look, I mean, you're trying to discover people; that's what you're trying to do, right? Yeah, you're the best at it. What do you look at? What do you look for? Somebody who's got a smart dance routine or something? No, I think it's more about somebody that has a specific niche that they do that's different than anybody else, you know, so we want to have creators
Do you think there's a niche for me on TikTok doing financial news, not dancing? No, no smart moves, just just I put to music my statements about the financial markets. Would you like to manage me? I I think you'd be pretty good. I think we could do a rapping uh finance news show on TikTok. You can be real creative on it. Probably not going to happen, Ariadna. And my own personal representative is going crazy at this point because of my threat to leave Ariadna. I found that really interesting. I I do understand your business a little bit better now. Come back and see us again soon. Okay, thank you so much for having me. Have a good one. Good stuff, Ariadna Jacob. Check some in.