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Author: Zhou Ke, official website of Yangfan Chuhai

TikTok emerged out of nowhere on social media, sweeping the world in a viral way and gaining hundreds of millions of users. The short video application market behind it is hard not to be coveted.

In March this year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill requiring ByteDance to deprive it of control of TikTok within 165 days, otherwise the app would be removed from the shelves in the United States. For a time, the future of TikTok became a problem.

In the face of the TikTok crisis, some people are ready to get a piece of the pie.

Scoopz is one of them.

This is a short video application that focuses on sharing real videos and real life. It was launched on May 18 last year. Data shows that by August 12 this year, the total downloads of scoopz had reached 4 million. However, looking at the timeline of its entire rise, scoopz only saw a more obvious increase in downloads in March this year.

The data shows that on March 1, the number of scoopz downloads was only 900 per day, but after that, the number of downloads soared, reaching a peak of 50,095 per day on August 2. Judging by the time of the download data growth, it took less than half a year for scoopz to go from obscurity to fame.

On the other hand, the rise of scoopz clearly overlapped with the outbreak of the TikTok crisis. Moreover, scoopz is only available in the United States worldwide. This makes it easy to imagine that when TikTok was facing the crisis of being removed from the shelves, scoopz's efforts were intended to attract users who had lost access to TikTok.

The short video cake is still too tempting. However, it is not easy for an application that has been rising for less than half a year to take a share of TikTok's cake. Scoopz can rise in a short period of time, and its operational ideas are worth discussing.

01. Will the old approach work in a head-on battle with TikTok?

"Real" is the most obvious label of Scoopz. With the slogan "Real Life, Real Video", Scoopz regards the authenticity of information and content as its biggest product point.

According to the official introduction, scoopz can provide users with not only news stories, but also short videos, allowing users to immerse themselves in the ocean of stories as soon as they open scoopz.

This positioning reminds us of a familiar advertising slogan - record a beautiful life, which is the slogan of Douyin.

It is not difficult to see that scoopz is even moving towards Douyin in its product promotion points.

Scoopz encourages users to become "storytellers". In this product, users are not only viewers but also creators, which combines story sharing and entertainment experience into one to enhance user interactivity.

If Scoopz has a unique and attractive advantage, the lack of ads should be one of it.

Its officials believe that saying goodbye to advertisements and enjoying uninterrupted video viewing can provide users with an undisturbed environment, allowing them to purely participate in product interaction and content production processes.

When we use products such as TikTok, our personal interests and hobbies will be recommended by big data algorithms. However, when we open the Scoopz app, the initial page will give us the interest options. Perhaps this approach can reduce the cost of big data calculations, help Scoopz quickly capture user preferences, and contribute corresponding video content.

Can imitation really lead to surpassing?

Open Scoopz, its content interface design is very similar to TikTok. You can see different videos by swiping up and down. However, in terms of content, we also found that Scoopz has two obvious characteristics:

First of all, the content tends to be very eye-catching, such as violence, violent conflicts, and funny videos, which can easily arouse people's emotions. Of course, the content recommended by these videos may be related to the fact that the account is a new user registration. Therefore, in order to attract new users to join, short video products often add more exciting content in the early recommendations to stimulate users' desire to pay attention.

Secondly, the quality of short video content is relatively poor. The poor quality mentioned here is mainly because many videos on Scoopz are copied from TikTok, so the video clarity is not high, and many videos can even be described as blurry. Although some of these videos have received relatively high likes, overall, when you see short videos with TikTok on Scoopz, you will still feel that this application is a copycat of TikTok. Especially compared with the exquisite short videos on TikTok, some low-quality video recommendations on Scoopz are difficult to keep users for a long time, and the release of these low-quality videos, especially the copied videos, also indirectly shows that Scoopz has low content production capacity and urgently needs a large number of original content creators to settle in.

While sliding the video interface, we also found that Scoopz does not have any advertisements, but it has repeatedly pushed content that calls on users to become creators on the platform, attracting users to "share real stories and important moments in life, express unique views and gain fans."

From the perspective of content alone, Scoopz imitates TikTok to a great extent and it is hard to say that there is any innovation. However, Scoopz officials deliberately avoid being labeled as imitating TikTok. They claim that their content is more inclined towards story sharing and news content, rather than entertainment like TikTok, spreading popular dances, etc.

If we talk about what makes Scoopz more attractive to users than TikTok, then the larger scale can be considered an important option. Of course, the scale has also become one of the biggest controversial points of Scoopz.

Is Scoopz really safe? In the parent community, there are articles about the recent explosion of popularity of Scoopz, which specifically raises the issue of its unsafety for minors. The first point is that its content is too large, and vulgar language, nudity, violence and other content are considered to have a negative impact on teenagers. Therefore, the safety of this platform for users has also been criticized due to content issues.

Amid the controversy, Scoopz's popularity continued to rise, especially during the outbreak of the TikTok crisis, when Scoopz seized the opportunity to rapidly expand its dissemination.

02. Delivery is prioritized, but content is scarce

March is a critical node. After the TikTok crisis was exposed, Scoopz increased its investment efforts.

Some users said that they learned about Scoopz through TikTok and found out about the existence of this app. We don’t know the logic behind Scoopz placing its advertisements on competitor platforms, but the effect is indeed obvious.

According to Guangda Big Data, the number of scoopz advertisements soared to 30,000 from March to August this year, and was reduced to 6,659 after strict deduplication.

Moreover, the period of increased advertising intensity of Scoopz coincides with the period of increased download volume, which shows that the effect of advertising is obvious.

From the perspective of advertising channels, since the beginning of this year, Scoopz's advertising channels have been mainly FB News Feed, Audience Network, Instagram, and Messenger, and the distribution of advertising in these channels is relatively balanced. The proportion of advertising on Google Ads and YouTube is relatively low, and the advertising data on TikTok is relatively small.

Along with the increased product influence brought by the launch, Scoopz’s download data in the US app market also helped it to have a significantly positive performance on the list.

According to the ranking data of the last 90 days, on May 18, Scoopz was ranked 468th in the US app list, and then it continued to rise. On August 5, its ranking in the US app list had risen to 73rd, and its highest ranking in the entertainment list also rose to 13th.

Some users compared scoopz with NewsBreak, saying that the two are very similar. This is probably what scoopz wants to achieve, but the reality is that the amount of content it produces is clearly insufficient.

In their reviews of the app, many users reported that there were duplicate videos they saw on Scoopz. This is understandable, after all, news is limited. From this perspective, another angle of Scoopz's product positioning - telling its own story - may become a breakthrough point for its subsequent content supplementation.

If there is no news, then tell stories. The key is to let users become the protagonists and attract users to participate in the creation.

The developer of Scoopz is Local AI, Inc. This developer has three applications, all of which will be launched in 2023. Among them, scoopz is the best performing one. The other two applications are Zest: Spice Up Local Life and Reverie: Chat with AI Hosts.

Zest: Spice Up Local Life is a sharing app where users can share hot topics in the city, store exploration experiences, local gatherings and events, etc. The content is very similar to China's Little Red Book.

Reverie: Chat with AI Hosts is an AI chat application, but this application is still immature.

An interesting phenomenon is that the three products of Local AI, Inc. are all modeled after popular applications in the current application market, but not all of them are modeled after them. For example, Scoopz imitates TikTok, but its positioning is mainly news and story content, avoiding the entertainment characteristics of the magic dance on TikTok. Zest is a bit like the Little Red Book, which attracts users to share content on its platform, but Zest's sharing is still only focused on urban life, and has not been widely popularized in various fields. It can be regarded as an immature prototype of "Little Red Book".

Local AI, Inc. is well versed in the creation of hit products. This can be clearly seen in the product growth path of scoopz. It starts with imitation, then uses the traffic brought by the copying route to quickly open up the market, and then, with rich content, opens up the dissemination path to attract more users to participate.

By choosing to promote TikTok during its crisis and accompanying it with content similar to TikTok, this "clone" version of "TikTok" has become a plan B for short video users outside of TikTok.

Of course, in the long run, in an era where content is king, the future of Scoopz will still rely on richer content to achieve product continuity and find more compliant solutions to issues such as content safety and scale. Large-scale content may attract users in a short period of time, but once the red line is touched, the risk of being removed from the shelves may bring catastrophic difficulties to Scoopz.

Balancing content richness and safety boundaries is always the foundation of content creation.