TikTok's global business solutions head says TikTok is an entertainment platform, not a social network like Facebook, and hasn't seen a slowdown in ad revenue
> Out of every 1,000 posts viewed on Facebook, how many, on average, include a link to a news site? Four. The saga of how Facebook has spent the past 7 years divorcing the news industry https://www.niemanlab.org/... Alex Sherman / @sherman4949 : I spoke with TikTok's head of biz solutions Blake Chandlee — who used to work at Facebook (for 12 years). He says if Facebook is trying to be more like TikTok, it risks running away from the thing it's good at. And what it's good at isn't being TikTok. https://www.cnbc.com/... Jay Yarow / @jyarow : Exec at TikTok (which is private so who knows) says “I've heard there's going to be a slowdown in the ad market, anywhere from 2% to 6%, but we have not seen it.” https://www.cnbc.com/... Matt Rosoff / @mattrosoff : Blake Chandlee spent 12 years at Facebook before joining TikTok, where he's now president of global business solutions. He tells @sherman4949 that TikTok actually isn't a social network like Facebook, but is more of an entertainmen... https://www.linkedin.com/... https://www.cnbc.com/... M.G. Siegler / @mgsiegler : Fast-forward to 2023: after every publication in the world has jumped to make their content more TikTok-like after Facebook said “jump!”, Facebook pivots to preferring text-based posts. And over and over and over... https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Alex Heath / @alexeheath : I got internal docs and interviewed the head of Facebook about how the app is going to become more like TikTok. The feed will increasingly show posts from accounts you don't follow — a big departure from how it currently works. That and more changes here: https://www.theverge.com/... Thanks: @mattrosoff See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta's plan to recommend posts from unconnected sources and reunite Messenger with Facebook puts its flagship app closer to TikTok's discovery-led model. TikTok's business chief, a former Facebook executive, argues the two services should not be treated as interchangeable.
The distinction matters because earlier coverage framed TikTok as a route to the social entertainment feed rather than merely an algorithmic extension of Instagram. Its reported ad-revenue resilience gives TikTok's entertainment positioning commercial weight as Meta changes Facebook.
First-order effects
- TikTok can present advertisers with a resilient entertainment product at the same moment it is rejecting the social-network comparison with Facebook.
- Meta's Facebook team must defend a product redesign that Chandlee says risks moving away from Facebook's established strengths.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers evaluating Facebook's recommended-content push gain a clearer comparison between a social-connection product and TikTok's entertainment-led feed, increasing pressure on Meta to show that the shift can sustain engagement and ad demand.
- TikTok's creator and music ecosystem gains strategic relevance: related coverage documented users taking on talent-scouting and publicity roles once associated with record labels, consistent with TikTok's claim to be an entertainment platform.
Third-order effects
- If major platforms continue to organize feeds around recommendations from unconnected sources, the competitive boundary between social networking and entertainment distribution will be set less by friend graphs and more by each platform's ability to package content for advertisers.
The trend: Social platforms are converging on recommendation-led entertainment feeds, while competing over whether that model complements or displaces connection-based networks.