Rainy days, muddy, village houses…

Brother and sister Savitri and Sanatan Mahto hummed indigenous tunes and danced in spite of their surroundings.

Source: TikTok

There are many more such videos on their TikTok homepage. These dance videos changed the fate of the two. They rose to fame on TikTok and have now gained nearly 2.7 million followers.

Source: TikTok

TikTok changed the fortunes of the Mahto family

From the video of the brothers and sisters, you can get a glimpse of their life background.

Far from the cities, they lived on the edge of Nipania, a village in the Indian state of Jharkhand. If you want to eat at the restaurant, you need to walk 24 kilometers, and the road is full of swamps.

In 2018, when Mahto started using TikTok, the changes weren’t so obvious. The owner of the restaurant would ignore his presence, but the clerk started asking for a photo with him. Walk into a motorcycle shop in town, and the shop owner won’t let this kid in “tattered” test drive at all.

In 2020, Mahtos reached 200 million TikTok users. There are more and more requests for group photos, and the owner of the restaurant will also look directly at this young man.

“TikTok has democratized the creator economy and brought money to marginalized groups,” said Sahil Shah, managing partner at WatConsult, India’s leading digital agency. “People like Mahto can earn monthly from brand collaborations $2,000 compared to about $130 as a farm worker.”

Young Indians in small towns like Mahto who have changed their fortunes through TIkTok (the so-called young Indians in small towns are not the small towns we often say, but towns other than the first-tier cities such as Delhi and Mumbai, and a large part of them are marginal caste youth) are not the majority. Affected by status, class, religion and caste, most Indian youths have difficulty finding jobs.

In the book Dreamers, it is mentioned that India has a population of 1.3 billion, of which 600 million are young people under the age of 25. This can be a huge asset for the country, or a dangerous group.

About 1 million young people in India need jobs every month, while only 100 can get jobs. Indian college students even need to compete for places as cleaners.

Faced with this predicament, many people choose to lie down and follow the trend, while those who are not reconciled do their best.

On the one hand, a steady stream of software engineers has stepped into the world of IT from small towns in India.

However, not every young Indian can become a software engineer. They are faced with the three no problems outlined by Plum: uneducated, unemployed, and incapable of working.

On the other hand, a group of young people in their early 20s with no education and no knowledge of English control what Americans see when they turn on their mobile phones in the morning. They feel that they not only master the password of traffic and wealth, but also feel that they have mastered the whole world through the Internet (excerpted from Dreamers).

At the same time, hundreds of operators in dilapidated buildings are responsible for 80 percent of all wire fraud in the United States, knowing it is a scam but choosing to do it anyway. Because they feel that their future self is the biggest victim (excerpted from Dreamers).

Young Indians in small towns have no choice.

“Coffee” is good, but Indian town youth need “rice”

The development of the Internet is too rapid. Dreamers was continuously recorded from 2014 to 2017. At that time, more Indian youths still learned about the world through Facebook and Twitter. The upper-class content creators, on the other hand, congregate mainly on YouTube and Instagram.

But when TikTok launched in India in 2017, it quickly became backward compatible. Even marginalized caste users appear more on the short video platform TikTok. It enables them to become a true part of the country’s digital culture and build their careers on this platform.

The internet has grown so fast that it was banned in June 2020 when the TikTok craze the youth of small towns in India.

Before the ban, India had four of the top 15 paid TikTokers globally, according to influencer analytics firm HypeAuditor. The company accounts for 7.7% of TikTok influencers in India. Top influencers can earn around $250,000 per collaborative post.

Around the same time, Instagram came to India with “fake” Reels.

There is no doubt that Reels wants to seize the vacancy left by TikTok.

However, Facebook (the company behind Instagram Reels) is not backward compatible, but by attracting a group of influencers from upper-class backgrounds such as: Komal Pandey, Kusha Kapila and Ammy Virk.

Dr Rahul Advani, a researcher at UCL who has studied the way the poorer segments of Indian society interact with the internet, sees a clear difference between Reels and TikTok: Reels are more for curators than creators, you need to be careful design every step to showcase your aesthetic.

Source: ins

You can show your surroundings unadorned on TikTok, but you can’t take the same scene to Instagram because it’s not polished enough.

Besides Reels, YouTube is not an option for small town Indian youth. In a notorious tussle with the YouTuber community in 2020, YouTube creator Carry Minati made casteist remarks against TikTokers, saying they had no talent whatsoever. TikTok users in India seem to be used to being yelled at.

In addition to these subjective factors, there are also some objective factors that hinder the use of YouTube by young Indians in small towns.

To post a video on TikTok, it takes Sanatan Mahto just 15 seconds with his low-end smartphone. And if he wants to upload his own video on YouTube, he needs to wait for a long time, and his mobile phone can’t support him to complete the simple operation of “uploading” at all.

Anti-caste activist Divya Kandukuri, a loyal TikTok user, also started using Reels after the ban. Describing the differences between the platforms, she likened it to studying at a privileged government university at the time, when her classmates told her that the place where they ate was not a “canteen” but a “cafe” .

“TikTok is a cafeteria and Instagram is a cafe,” Kankaduri said. “But canteens have better food and cafes offer expensive coffee, which is not for everyone.”

Source: ins

A year after the ban, short videos are still hot in India, but…?

Since TikTok was banned, in addition to Reels’ own Instagram traffic, local Indian brands have also emerged.

The largest of these is ShareChat’s Moj (a native Indian brand) with 2.5 million videos uploaded every day. It is estimated that by 2025, 600 million to 650 million Indians will become short video consumers, and the time spent watching short videos will be as high as 1 hour per day. Currently, more than 50 million users in India have created and posted at least one short video.

Source: Google

The short video boom has helped boost the overall influencer economy. The agency Isobar India said that the share of their clients’ marketing budgets devoted to digital advertising has risen from 5% to 25%. And Reels fills the high-end line market that TikTok or local short video platforms cannot seize.

While short videos are popular, long video users are also growing more rapidly. For example, movies and online programs on mainstream media platforms such as Netflix and Disney+ hotstar have a wider penetration rate, with users reaching 350-400 million. At the same time, there are only more than 200 million short video users.

But obviously, the use cases of long videos and short videos are not the same.

A year after the ban, when Sanatan Mahto went to the restaurant again, the waiter who took a photo of him asked him quietly, “What have you been doing lately? Why don’t you post a video?”

“On Instagram.” Sanatan replied with a smile.

“What’s that?” the waiter asked.