TikTok’s Potential Ban and What It Means for Every Brand That Built an Audience There
In April 2024, the United States Congress passed legislation requiring ByteDance — TikTok’s Chinese parent company — to divest its US operations within nine months or face a ban. The bill was signed into law by President Biden. Legal challenges are underway. The outcome remains uncertain.
For the brands and creators who have invested years building audiences on TikTok — and there are many — this represents an existential platform risk that is, by any measure, exactly the scenario that kept marketing strategists up at night.
The Scale of What’s at Stake
TikTok has approximately 170 million US users. It has become the primary content discovery platform for Gen Z — a cohort that doesn’t just use TikTok for entertainment but uses it as a search engine, a news source, and a product discovery platform. TikTok SEO is a real discipline. “TikTok made me buy it” is a real consumer behavior pattern that has driven billions in e-commerce revenue.
The brands that built significant TikTok presences — and there are thousands of them, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small e-commerce operators — built that presence on rented land. They don’t own their followers. They don’t own their content in any distribution sense. They can download their videos, but they can’t take their audience with them if the platform disappears.
What Smart Brands Should Be Doing Right Now
Whether TikTok survives in the US or not, the TikTok situation is a forcing function for a conversation every brand should have had years ago: what happens to our marketing strategy if our primary platform goes away?
The answers to that question reveal your platform dependency risk. If the answer is “we’d lose most of our reach and have no clear alternative,” that’s a vulnerability that needs addressing regardless of what happens to TikTok specifically. Because TikTok is one example of platform risk. It won’t be the last.
The brands handling this well are doing two things: first, they’re diversifying their content distribution across multiple platforms so that no single platform represents an unacceptable concentration of audience. Second, they’re investing in owned channels — email, SMS, their own app, their community — so that they have a direct relationship with their audience that doesn’t depend on any platform’s business model or regulatory environment.
The Broader Principle
Platform risk is real. It always has been. Facebook’s algorithm changes in 2018 devastated brands that had built their entire strategy around organic reach. Twitter’s management chaos affected brands differently but just as significantly. Now TikTok. The pattern is consistent: building your brand on someone else’s platform creates dependency that can be disrupted by decisions entirely outside your control.
The solution isn’t to avoid platforms — they’re too powerful to ignore. The solution is to use them as acquisition channels while simultaneously building owned audiences that give you resilience. Use TikTok to reach new people. Use email to keep them. That’s the durable strategy.
Every audience you build on a platform you don’t own is an audience you’re renting. The TikTok situation is just the latest reminder that leases can end without notice.
Steve Wolf
Steve Wolf is a C-suite marketing executive and growth strategist with 20 years of experience. He serves as CMO of Pinnacle Global Network and CEO of Aquaphant.
