Amazon is seeking to mimic TikTok to attract viewers.
Key details
Amazon has been testing a feed on its main app full of pictures and videos of products posted by other users on the app. The feed style is similar to TikTok. Using the feature, called Inspire, customers can like, save, and share posts of products, and purchase items directly from the feed, according to Watchful Technologies, an Israeli-based artificial-intelligence firm that analyzes apps and has tracked the feature.
Why it’s news
TikTok has been gaining millions of users making it the number-one app across many platforms. The app consists of short videos that capture users attention and the app has also developed a specific algorithm that plays videos specifically for each consumer.
The number of teenagers who say they are constantly online has nearly doubled since 2015, according to a recent survey from Pew Research Center that also illustrates how rapidly the competitive landscape for social media is changing.
TikTok, which was launched in the U.S. in 2018, is now used by about 67% of those between 13 and 17 years old.
This new Amazon feed is still in the testing stage and doesn’t mean that the company will introduce this to every customer. Amazon spokesman Alyssa Bronikowski declined to say if the company has plans to introduce the feature to all its customers. In a statement, Bronikowski says the company is “constantly testing new features to help make customers’ lives a little easier,” reports The Associated Press.
Other companies also following
The parent companies of both Google and Facebook, the two biggest sellers in digital advertising, have also been pushing their own TikTok replicas in hopes to keep customers interested in their services so they can continue to boost revenue.
Google’s YouTube video service rolled a “Shorts” feature limited to clips of a minute or less last year in the U.S. after initially testing it in India during 2020. By June of this year, Google said YouTube Shorts was attracting more than 1.5 billion logged-in users each month, although analysts believe TikTok’s popularity is undercutting ad sales at the video site, says AP.
Meanwhile, Facebook offers its own take on the popular app, a short-form video feature called Reels, on its Instagram app as well as its main social networking service, which now operate as part of Meta Platforms. Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Reels accounted for more than 20% of the time that people spend on Instagram.
