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Welcome back to HotToks. This edition we report on Matt Rife's fall from fame, your very own author's opinion and experience with TikTok Shop, and how long-form content seems to be thriving on the app.
When he started posting snippets of his crowd work on TikTok (and this viral clip), Matt Rife got his first taste of fame. In July of 2022, one of his videos showing him doing “crowd work” on a woman in the audience who broke up with an ER worker went viral, earning him over 40M views; he became an online sensation basically overnight.
With his popularity came the overwhelming comments about how good-looking he is. It seems as though his audience is primarily straight women who love to go to his comedy shows for the chance to interact with him during his crowd work. Or, that’s how TikTok makes it seem. Most of his viral moments are him flirting or interacting with women in the audience. His looks got him so much attention that a woman wore a T-shirt that read “will trade husband for Matt Rife” to one of his shows.
Fast forward to now, Rife, a creator with over 18.2M followers on the platform, has recently been the subject of much TikTok discourse and scrutiny regarding his new Netflix comedy special, “Natural Selection,” which has been in Netflix’s Top 10 for at least two weeks. You don’t have to watch much of the comedy special to see why it caused such an uproar among the TikTok community, one that brought about his rise to fame. He kicks off his set with a joke about domestic violence and then laughs it off with, “I just wanted to see if y’all were fun.” The crowd might’ve been fun, but the TikTok community was most definitely not feeling it.
Since then, he’s been getting a lot of (bad) attention on the platform, people clowning him for that Netflix special and even questioning how he landed that opportunity. While he’s been receiving backlash from even his fans, he’s seemingly annoyed by the public’s feelings towards his comedy, saying, “you deserve to say what’s funny to you.” Side note: he’s also been allegedly absolutely beefing with his plastic surgeon.
This prompts a conversation about, firstly, whether Netflix should have higher barriers to entry. Secondly, has TikTok inflated our sense of what’s successful and/or what’s funny? As the platform almost solely responsible for his success, TikTok allowed Matt Rife’s witty, shareable clips to be spread around like wildfire and has almost created a false sense of what an hour straight with this guy on stage would be like.
As one of the first TikTok creators to do so, his debut on Netflix has been coined the “Matt Rife Effect,” or the TikTok-to-Netflix comedy pipeline. For a comedian, landing a comedy special is a pretty big deal: Netflix stated that in 2019, almost half of its entire user base of 150M viewers had watched at least one comedy special on the platform. With his comedy special being so successful, we’re unfortunately unsure if more of this will come.
TikTok Shop has been ramping up lately, in my experience with the app. There was a time when my ad-to-organic FYP content ratio was around 30:70, but now it’s becoming 60:40, and the videos “eligible for commission” are quickly taking over my feed. Is it just me?
The desire for the app to stack up against e-commerce giant Amazon is not unheard of. But it’s getting to the point where TikTok has just been getting “dangerously good at making you spend money.” Some of the reasoning behind this could be that the people promoting these TikTok Shop products are just like you or me; they’re not huge creators, but they’re more like friends who are recommending a product they know I’d really like. It’s the combination of these creators and TikTok’s algorithm knowing exactly what you would potentially like that motivates viewers to purchase.
As of its U.S. launch in September, the e-commerce platform now sells about $7M worth of products daily in the U.S. and is on track to reach its goal of doing $10M in business per day by the end of the year. TikTok Shop still has a long way to go to compete with Amazon, but it will always have a leg up in commanding attention.
As a personal case study, I frequently look for different K-Beauty products and online reviews on TikTok (hello, search engine), especially cleansing balms (those are my vice). I keep getting served videos about K-Beauty that are “eligible for commission.” I’ve also been absolutely engrossed with the Kelly-Joanna situation (#hoodiegate, IYKYK). As a result, I recently got served Kelly’s TikTok Shop videos talking about recommendations for K-Beauty. They’re just getting so smart these days.
Nowadays, there are many creators who almost focus exclusively on making review and product recommendation videos, and when you continuously see the same product being talked about again and again as you scroll through your feed, even if you don’t end up converting and making the purchase, at least you’ll gain product (and even brand) awareness—which, as we all know is just as important for ultimately moving the needle.
The live selling market, a tactic that emerged from Chinese social media that is still very successful there, is still very much a part of this conversation. The U.S. live selling market was expected to reach $32B in sales this year. As a case study example, TikTok creator Brandon Hurst has sold more than 30,000 plants since he joined TikTok Shop, ahead of its formal launch in April via live-streaming every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. He says, “I try to turn it into kind of like a show, a little bit like QVC…within the first five minutes, we already are at like 10 or 15 orders.” What a feat.
TikTok now says, “users spend half their time in the app watching minute+ long clips.” Though the app started off as Vine-adjacent, making short, funny clips go viral, especially during the pandemic, the social media platform is growing ever so big in many different ways. It’s competing with Google to be the go-to search engine, competing with Spotify to be the go-to music streaming platform, competing with Amazon to be the go-to e-commerce shopping platform, obviously competing with Instagram to be the go-to social media platform, and also competing with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, etc. to be the next go-to streaming platform. TikTok is one busy bee.
Now add YouTube to the list. During an event in late October, TikTok executives told creators that by “embracing longer videos, they can make more money and have more time to get their messages out.” The ByteDance company told creators that “users are now spending half their time on the app watching content that’s longer than a minute. And over the past six months, creators who post videos longer than a minute have five times the growth rate in followers of those who post only short videos.”
Long gone are the days when short videos were king. We are in a new wave of video essays and vlog-style content on TikTok. Going along this trajectory, TikTok is laddering up to become a long-form content destination, similar to YouTube or an entertainment streaming platform (two birds, one stone). This tracks. Creators have been launching full episodes of TV shows and full movie clips on the platform.
I’ll thank Susi for propelling the desire for more long-form content on the platform.
Thanks for reading!
- Viv
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