Google and Microsoft are busy ‘fighting’ each other without knowing a 7-year-old company is quietly attacking the $112 billion district

While Google and Microsoft are vying for the future leadership of artificial intelligence (AI)-based search, few know that TikTok is quietly preparing a big game of its own regarding this array.

Recently, TikTok has been testing search ads (when search will return results as display ads or approximate keyword phrases) for a certain segment of users.

Sources close to the matter say TikTok is introducing the product more often and inviting advertisers to participate more actively.

These moves and the recruitment news of search advertising engineers to develop TikTok’s “large-scale advertising system” suggest that this product will soon be widely deployed by the company.

Shamsul Chowdur, vice president of paid social media at advertising agency Jellyfish, believes TikTok will do just that in the third quarter of this year. This is supposed to give TikTok time to better understand search trends before the key spend period in the fourth quarter.

Chowdury commented: “Generation Z is using TikTok for search similar to when they use Google. If TikTok can take advantage of that for advertisers, it could mean a huge increase in revenue“.

According to Business Insider, TikTok is “trying” to exploit the search advertising market worth $ 112 billion this year.

Brendan Gahan, partner and director of social media at advertising agency Mekanism, said:TikTok is taking this matter seriously. They can really create a whole new source of advertising revenue“.

Even a small percentage of this market can yield huge profits. Microsoft recently said it can add $2 billion in ad revenue for every percentage point of search market share that Bing can win from Google.

A TikTok spokesperson said the details they can share about search ads on TikTok are still limited in the initial testing phase. TikTok describes its search ad format as “New entrance leads to familiar user-generated content and community experiences“.

Selected advertisers can now enable search ads on TikTok, which appear as thumbnails on the search results page.

An advertising industry expert expressed the view: “TikTok is attacking different aspects of content that no other platform can. The company is using images, landscapes, voice, text or keywords… to choose which ads to show while traditional search engines consider titles, descriptions, and tags for videos.“.

According to this expert, that allows TikTok’s ads to be more personalized to each user’s interests. Of course, until now, TikTok still needs to do a lot to beat Google’s dominance in search.

While Google has long dominated the sector, it is now getting more defensive as TikTok, Microsoft and Amazon try to vie for market share. According to Prabhar Raghavan, Google’s vice president of information and knowledge, their studies last year found that “nearly 40%” of young people surveyed said they would search for a place to eat lunch on TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Maps or Google Search.

Another setback is that the TikTok app has faced criticism regarding personal data and is even restricted in many countries.

Source: BIEN