Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Let's talk about how this is impacting TikTok uses and the brands that use it. Rachel Tipograf is founder and CEO. Make Mack is an e commance marketing platform for multi channel brams. What did they make of the sudden going black? Did brands pull away from spending on TikTok? It's been wild.
January eighteenth, ten pm, New York Time, we saw TikTok brand traffic go to zero percent. It stayed that way for fifteen hours. Traffic started to come back January nineteenth, twelve fifteen pm, and for about two business days it held at zero point five percent of our traffic. Wow, in the last two business days it has risen. It now represents around fifteen percent of our total traffic. I've
been coming on the show now for two years. You've heard me say TikTok typically is thirty five percent of our traffic. Based on this meteoric rise in the last two business days, we at MCMAC leave that we're going to get back to normal rates on Monday.
Rachel, what is the fallout for businesses that are tied in some way or another? Two TikTok from all the uncertainty surrounding whether we'll continue, whether there will be a purchaser.
Yeah, so I think the delta between fifteen and thirty five percent is essentially all those Fortune one thousand brands that are feeling very skittish right now with the uncertainty and who's going to be the new parent owner, as well as just the overall view right now of the Supreme Court. They don't want to be held liable and typically they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on that platform.
So there is a large set right now of the Fortune one thousand brands that are just waiting to see what the outcome is going to be, make sure they have to make decisions and whey to allocate Right now, we're just seeing some of your data.
Who's winning.
Yeah, So these brands, they're heavily reliant obviously on their marketing budgets. It's how they drive demand generation and sales. So in the last say two weeks, we have watched spend move out of TikTok as well as meta. We can circle back on that into alphabet, which is paid search, YouTube, DV three sixty and pinterest The reason why is that brands are looking for reach, conversion, and brand safety. Alphabet
absolutely delivers on reach and conversion. They've made enormous efforts around brand safety since all of the challenges YouTube had in twenty twelve. And then Pinterest. I've been on the show, I talked about it. It's a dark horse that no one talks about. It's the safest place on the Internet, and brands are moving dollars there because Pinterest can drive conversion as well. So the big winners are Alphabet and Pinterest.
The reason why we've also seen a decline in meta traffic in the month of January has everything to do with the announcement Zuckerberg made two and a half weeks ago when he announced that fact checking was going to be removed from the platform. Brands once again fell skittish. Brands care about their law term, brand equity, their brand safety, and whenever a platform becomes political, they reallocate dollars to platforms that they have more confidence in their brand safety.
Rachel, we were just talking to a prospective bidder for TikTok. What does all this churn mean for its value and perhaps ultimate purchase price.
I'm personally skeptical of what's going to happen with this divestiture if it goes into the hands of a new US parent owner. TikTok is not TikTok without the algorithm. The community is based on the app automatically pushing you like minded people. That's what makes TikTok so magical. With a new US parent owner, if they can't replicate the magic of that algorithm, I know with significant confidence people are going to move out of TikTok. We saw it in the last two weeks. It's so easy to build
a new community in a new app. Will be red note, will it be blue sky, will it be pinterest on time, will tell? And so I have trepidation on what's going to happen. From a brand advertiser standpoint. They're going to go wherever eyeballs and engagement are. So brands can move their dollars very easily. I think we've all seen that in the month of January. It's like trading on Wall Street media buying. You can move a dollar from one platform to the next in a second.
Rachel Tipograph, founder and CEO of Mick Mac, we thank you