TikTok copycats on a hot tin roof

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

TikTok. On June 29, 2020, around midnight, the infotainment content creator addressed her 7.3 million followers on the Chinese short-videosharing app, just hours before it was banned in India over national security concerns. She remembers the frenzy that followed.

In the following months, a dozen, homegrown, venture capital-funded apps emerged to fill the void left by ByteDance’s flagship platform in India, then its biggest overseas market with 200 million active users. They even took a leaf out of ByteDance’s playbook and paid celebrities and creators to sign up and post content on their apps. Geet — who goes by her first name and is @theofficialgeet on Instagram — entered into an exclusive contract with one of these apps a year into the hype cycle.

While she does not disclose the name of the app to ET, she recalls that she felt something was off. “I would get a lot of views on every video I posted but it did not lead to engagement in the form of comments or messages like it normally does with my content,” she says. “The figure seemed inflated to me.” After her six-month contract expired, she did not post on the app.

Her experience resonates with many in the industry. Three years after they vociferously claimed to build a TikTok for Bharat, most of these short video apps have pivoted, merged, or simply disappeared. Their average monthly active users (MAUs) have declined year-on-year, and so have their app installs, according to data sourced by ET.