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For hundreds of millions of fans around the world, TikTok is the place to go for videos of dancing celebrities, cooking advice and teenage hormones on overdrive.
For its critics, TikTok is a front for the Chinese government that censors its users and makes it too easy for pedophiles to stalk innocent children.
Michael Beckerman's job is to persuade Congress that TikTok is something else entirely: a trustworthy social media platform that helps families bond and gives them authoritative health information — all while protecting them from both the Chinese and the creeps.
"I've never shied away from a challenge," he says.
Beckerman, the former president and founder of the Internet Association, joined TikTok a month ago as its top lobbyist in Washington, with marching orders to build out the company's D.C. presence. Sources familiar with the situation said TikTok sought him out for the job, hoping to leverage his years of relationships in Congress and within the Trump administration to help the company shed its shaky reputation.
It's easy to see why TikTok turned to Beckerman. When Beckerman started IA eight years ago, he personally set up the association's bank account, chose the office space and built out the team. Today, with more than 40 tech company members, IA brands itself as the voice of Silicon Valley in Washington — to the chagrin of some other tech trade associations. But even some of IA's competitors say TikTok made a smart move when it hired Beckerman. Steve DelBianco, the president and CEO of tech trade association NetChoice — of which TikTok is a member — said Beckerman gives the company some "needed credibility and relationships on Capitol Hill."
Still, some of Beckerman's peers and former employees said they were surprised when he announced he was moving to TikTok in February. "There's a lot of things going on: an overlay of privacy and kids, TikTok and national security concerns," said Gary Shapiro, a tech policy veteran and longtime head of the Consumer Technology Association. "It's an incredibly challenging position he's in."
TikTok has endured a steady clip of negative headlines and multiple congressional hearings devoted almost entirely to bashing the company and its parent company, Bytedance. As the first Chinese-tied app to make significant inroads in Western markets, TikTok itself is in a tenuous position as anti-Chinese sentiment reaches a fever pitch in Washington.
"TikTok challenges are beyond the techlash challenges," said one of Beckerman's former employees. "You've got techlash plus the national security piece." A trade association source agreed that TikTok has "unique problems. "They need a Washington office," the source said. "Their survival in the U.S. may depend on that."
TikTok clearly grasps the gravity of its Washington challenges. In the first three months of 2020, ByteDance spent $300,000 on lobbying, doubling its spending during the previous quarter. It tapped an array of top Washington firms to lobby on its behalf, including K&L Gates, Monument Advocacy, and Mehlman Castagnetti Rosen & Thomas.
Beckerman entered the fray in the first week or March, just as the coronavirus pandemic began to upend life for businesses across the United States — and for TikTok. He flew out to California to meet his colleagues and go through onboarding. By the time he landed back in Washington, shutdowns were beginning to sweep the country.
But the timing may have been fortuitous. Coronavirus has bolstered the company's fortunes — and presented it with a chance to flip the script.
At its core, TikTok brands itself as a fun, lighthearted app that can provide a respite from other social media platforms dominated by politics and news. It's an attractive option for tens of millions of American children and adults, forced to stay inside; TikTok's #HappyatHome hashtag has amassed 13.5 billion views in a little over a month, making it one of the most popular hashtags in the company's history.
Michael Beckerman's job is to persuade Congress that TikTok is a trustworthy social media platform that helps families bond and gives them authoritative health information — all while protecting them from creeps.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
On Thursday, mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower announced TikTok had amassed more than 2 billion downloads, generating the most downloads for any app ever in a quarter. TikTok does not offer specific numbers, but the company confirmed it has seen a significant uptick in users and time spent on the app since COVID-19 hit. It's a serious challenge to Facebook's family of apps, YouTube, Twitter and other top social media networks.
TikTok has used the crisis as an opportunity to build a different reputation for itself. For the past month, the company has been laser-focused on building COVID-19 tools within the app and rolling out new safety features geared toward parents and their children.
"When this crisis is passed and we all look back at the time during the quarantine and during the pandemic for the planet, I think companies will be judged by the way they've handled it," Beckerman said. "When we all look back and policymakers take a real hard look at our company and others, they'll have a better understanding of what this company's about and what it's capable of."
Starting in mid-March, TikTok began sending out a weekly newsletter touting its proudest accomplishments to aides on Capitol Hill, including those in offices that have been openly critical of TikTok, according to copies of the newsletter obtained by Protocol.
One Senate aide said their office hasn't heard directly from TikTok since a snafu in which the company canceled multiple meetings with lawmakers at the last minute in December. But the "TikTok government affairs" newsletter started showing up in Capitol Hill inboxes on March 23. In a recent issue, the company promoted the $375 million TikTok has committed to support COVID-19 relief efforts. In another, a section under the heading "TikTok for Good" announced the United Nations had joined TikTok in order to provide "trusted information for our community."
At the same time it's promoting its coronavirus work, TikTok is trying to negate some of the criticisms it's faced.
In mid-March, the company convened the first meeting of its "TikTok Content Advisory Council," a panel of outside advisers including several leading online speech experts tasked with helping TikTok improve its content moderation policies, which have come under fire many times before.
The council members met over video, said Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and the meeting revolved around election integrity. TikTok employees presented ideas around how to deal with disinformation, and council members gave feedback according to their expertise. The council's second meeting, held on Tuesday, was devoted to protecting minors on the app, he said.
"I'm sure that if they do a good job on [content moderation] … it would certainly make their life easier in Washington vis-a-vis the 'China issue,'" Atkinson said.
Last week, TikTok banned users under 16 from sending or receiving direct messages, a restriction children's safety advocates have encouraged in order to combat "grooming," when predators reach out to children online and try to get them to meet in real life — a serious problem for an app that explicitly attracts minors.
Family Online Safety Institute CEO Stephen Balkam, who has been advising TikTok on its child safety efforts, said the task of making social media safer for children is "never over." But he credited TikTok for committing resources to protecting children since the Federal Trade Commission hit the company with a record $5.7 million fine for violating children's privacy laws last year.
Balkam said TikTok is "beefing up their Washington office to make sure they don't fall foul of regulations."
Right now, there are only a handful of TikTok employees in Washington — a far cry from the massive lobbying operations of Facebook, Google and Microsoft. It's Beckerman's job to help build out TikTok's Washington presence — and help the company push back against its critics.
Last month, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley introduced legislation to ban TikTok from government phones, and Indiana Republican Rep. Jim Banks put out a bill that would send users warnings before they download apps like TikTok.
"TikTok and China should be considered one and the same because all the entities that prop up China's economy, regardless of whether they are state-owned, have no choice but to adhere to Beijing's authoritarian demands for control and oppression," Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, said in a statement to Protocol on Wednesday. "While I welcome steps to increase privacy controls for children's online safety, TikTok will not be able to assuage my concerns over its ability to obtain consumer data."
TikTok has denied allegations that it operates at the best of the Chinese government and insists it stores all TikTok U.S. data in the United States with backup in Singapore.
Beckerman said part of his role will be to "correct the record" about how TikTok operates.
The company is planning to launch a "transparency center," a museum-like exhibition in Los Angeles and eventually Washington. TikTok will invite policymakers to the centers to get a closer look at how the company operates and makes its policy decisions. Beckerman says construction has been delayed by coronavirus.
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Meanwhile, Beckerman himself will have some bridge-building to do. He comes into the position with some baggage; there are lingering resentments in the tech community about IA's decision to support a compromise version of SESTA-FOSTA, legislation that pared down Section 230 to hold online companies liable for knowingly facilitating sex trafficking. "That left a bitter taste in a lot of peoples' mouths, both in the government and in industry about how that all played out," said one tech industry source.
DelBianco sees some irony in Beckerman's new role. "Michael will likely want TikTok's trade associations like Netchoice to hold the edge on issues like Section 230 and content moderation," he said.
IA says protecting against further erosion of Section 230 is a "top priority." Will Beckerman seek to have TikTok become a member of his old group? "We'll have to see," he said. "We're still focusing on building our team in Washington first."
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These are all great initiatives to help foster work-life balance after a stressful year. But if you're worried about long-term burnout at your company, you should also look into ways to prioritize team well-being all year round. Just as with building a healthier lifestyle, enacting measures of support on the day-to-day level is where lasting change is made.
Set healthy communication boundaries — and model them
According to a 2020 report by Aviva, 44% of employees say they feel like they "never switch off from work," while 70% of all workers say they regularly check emails and messages outside of work hours. And these habits have consequences: More than half of employees feel like their mental and physical health have suffered due to work pressures.
When employees may not feel like they can draw a line in the sand between their work and personal lives, it's up to leadership to clearly share communication expectations and model healthy boundaries. Encourage employees to turn off all email, Slack and work app notifications outside of working hours, and ensure that managers aren't reaching out to team members after-hours with requests.
Make sure that your company's leaders aren't just paying lip service to employees' right to disconnect, either. That means everyone in leadership — from the CEO down to team managers — should avoid sending emails during off-hours or reaching out to team members during their paid time off. By living the guidelines, leadership can help employees feel psychologically safe to stick to the recommended boundaries.
Just as with building a healthier lifestyle, enacting measures of support on the day-to-day level is where lasting change is made.
Eliminate unnecessary meetings
"Well, that meeting could have been an email." A recent joint study from Harvard Business School and New York University found that the average number of meetings increased 12.9% during the pandemic, while the size of each meeting grew by 13.5%. Meetings are the first and fastest way for your company to free up valuable team time.
Some companies have decided to implement "No-Meeting Wednesdays" to help employees recover. At Trello, employees will take regular "Maker time," where they forego any meetings to focus on creative work. But another option includes taking a closer look at each meeting on an employee's calendar and asking, "Does this meeting really need to exist?"
While some events should happen in real time — such as one-on-ones or difficult conversations — many other meetings can be carried out asynchronously. A project update is a great example of this. Rather than meet every Monday to discuss everyone's progress on a new project, team members can simply add their weekly updates to a list on Trello and respond to one another asynchronously. Everyone's kept in the loop, and no one has to sacrifice an additional hour of their time.
Companywide meetings announcing a new feature are another example. Rather than ask everyone at the company to spend half an hour in a meeting, consider typing the update in an email, sharing on Slack or adding the recap to your company's knowledge base on Trello. The example above takes advantage of Trello's integration with Loom to record and attach a video update for those looking to save time typing.
Cut down on context-switching
According to Blissfully's 2019 SaaS Trends Report, the average employee uses at least eight apps a day to get their work done. It's no wonder 40% of employees are frustrated by the collaboration and communication tools they're expected to use at work. Because they're constantly switching between email, chat, video, documents and more, employees find it harder than ever to focus on the actual work they need to carry out, which stretches out working hours, wastes time and leads to burnout.
To lower the amount of context-switching team members have to do, decrease the number of tools they need to monitor throughout the day. Make it clear that emails and chat messages aren't emergencies and that notifications can be muted while deep work is being carried out. (This is something Trello employees do by setting their "Slack off" hours.) Most of the time, work won't suffer if employees only check their inboxes or Slack messages every couple of hours.
You can also help employees reduce their context-switching by keeping information organized on one platform. According to a 2019 survey by 8x8, nearly 50% of employees say they spend up to two hours a day looking for the information they need to do their jobs. This cuts into valuable time that employees could be spending doing work that matters to them.
Cut back on the amount of time employees need to spend hunting down information by centralizing as much work as possible in a tool stack that is accessible for everyone. For example, if a project is being tracked in Trello, ask the team to keep all progress updates, questions and feedback within the project board, where everyone can see the same timeline view of the work.
Work from other apps in our tool stack is enhanced through integrations, so documentation from Confluence or tickets from Jira are linked and visible to our projects.
Whichever toolset you choose, consider the "single pane of glass" concept: Your teams operate in a busy workplace, so making information visible and discoverable in as few locations as possible goes a long way in reducing frustration and busywork.
Check in on employees regularly
Saving the most important tip for last, invest in manager coaching and resources for recognizing and addressing the warning signs of burnout in employees. Have them check in on employees' stress levels during one-on-one meetings and encourage everyone at the company to take regular vacation and sick days when needed.
Managers should also keep a close eye on how much work employees are taking on. Star employees will often over-commit to work — without complaints — and burn themselves out, which helps no one. Managers need to step in and stop employees from taking on Herculean workloads because, even if someone can do a lot of extra tasks, it doesn't mean they should.
Fortunately, managers who use Trello can see exactly how much work their team members are taking on using the Dashboard view:
With data on task distribution and due-date management, managers can see who is taking on (and completing) a reasonable amount of work and who might be overextending or falling behind. We use data for every other business decision; why not see how it can empower more equitable team management?
Stop the slow burn
The pandemic may have exacerbated employee burnout, but it was an issue long before COVID-19. Unfortunately, there's no single solution that can extinguish burnout, either. Support your employees' ability to focus and work-life balance by focusing on their day-to-day experiences — and you'll stop burnout from smoldering on for too long.
Trello moves teamwork forward by bringing productivity, collaboration and team spirit together in one place. Get a free trial of Business Class to try out Views, including Dashboard and Timeline. And if you want to see how Trello can be implemented across organizations, check out our best practices for setting up a shared toolstack like Trello Enterprise at scale.
It's not clear what might fall through the cracks if most of the biggest game studios transition away from selling individual games and instead embrace a mix of free-to-play and subscription bundling.
Image: Christopher T. Fong/Protocol
Subscription services have existed in gaming for decades, both for individual games like World of Warcraft and for console platform services like Sony's PlayStation Plus. But a new wave of game subscriptions — Netflix-style, all-you-can-play buffets — have only just begun emerging in the last few years. Now, as these subscriptions are married to nascent but fast-growing cloud gaming services that allow you to stream games to almost any screen, the industry is bracing itself for a potential paradigm shift akin to what happened to television, film and music.
"It's probably the likes of Netflix and Spotify that have ended up pushing us to this point in games," said Craig Chapple, an industry analyst with the firm Sensor Tower. "How many times have you heard, 'When's the Netflix of gaming coming?'" (Netflix, it turns out, is getting into gaming itself, although it's tempered expectations by saying it will focus on mobile games first.)
It's not clear the industry is ready, or that the economics of gaming today can withstand a full-blown switchover to a subscription and streaming-only world. Video games come in many shapes and sizes, and monetize in vastly different ways. One game might cost $4.99, another $69.99. Some are free, while others charge as much as $14.99 a month just to access.
It's unlikely the whole industry would ever shift to subscription bundling because of these factors. But it's also not clear what might fall through the cracks if most of the biggest game studios do transition in some way away from selling individual games and instead embracing a mix of free-to-play and subscription bundling.
"I am reluctant about subscription services. It's worse than in music. The potential risks here are huge," said Rami Ismail, an independent game developer and consultant who co-developed a series of hit games under the label Vlambeer. "The amount of money that goes into a video game compared to an album is relatively large. There are more people working on them, and it takes more time to make them."
Unlike Hollywood or the music industry, which can standardize pricing because the length and presumed value of a single song or movie is more or less agreed upon, the video game industry has resisted distribution models other media adopted more than 10 years ago. Many consumers still buy games on Blu-ray discs sold in shrink-wrapped plastic boxes at brick-and-mortar retail stores.
"We're looking at the same model [as the music industry]," Ismail added. "People aren't going to pay more for the game subscription than they are for the Spotify subscription. I don't think I could meaningfully argue that people play more games than they listen to music."
The perils of subscription gaming
The game industry's slow adoption of new distribution models has helped create an atmosphere of apprehension around subscription services. It's not necessarily because everyone is resisting change, but rather because it seems an almost Herculean task to yank a ship as large as the nearly $200 billion video game business into the future all at once.
"It's very hard to launch a $120 million game on a subscription service charging $9.99 a month," Shawn Layden, a former PlayStation exec in charge of its internal studios, told Gamesindustry.biz this week. Layden's concern is that the kinds of games that are most at home on subscription services — big-budget console games sold for between $60 and $70 nowadays (like the kind Sony still makes) — aren't catering to a large enough customer base to recoup development costs through a subscription service. That's especially true, he said, as the cost of making those AAA games has ballooned in recent years, all while the price has remained in the same $10 range.
A subscription service doesn't necessarily work for all types of games.
Image: Microsoft
"You pencil it out, you're going to have to have 500 million subscribers before you start to recoup your investment. That's why right now you need to take a loss-leading position to try to grow that base," Layden added. "But still, if you have only 250 million consoles out there, you're not going to get to half a billion subscribers. So how do you circle that square? Nobody has figured that out yet."
Layden's math may be a bit of an exaggeration. Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass most likely does not need half a billion subscribers to make it a profitable and sustainable enterprise. But it does need tens of millions, and perhaps even hundreds of millions, to become a true Netflix-for-games platform, one that can recoup investments on all the games Microsoft wants to include on release day, and the many more games from non-Xbox owned studios it will need to pay for to keep people subscribed.
Take-Two President Karl Slatoff expressed similar concerns last fall, saying on an investor call, "We're highly skeptical that subscriptions will be the only way or the primary way that interactive entertainment is distributed." He added that the typical consumption of video games vastly dwarfed how much consumers pay for them, making them a better deal when sold individually than when bundled. "That's because of the way people consume it. And the price point for owning a title, which is very reasonable and very, very low, actually, on a per-hour basis."
Microsoft bought Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media last fall for $7.5 billion as part of a strategy to bring more game studios under its wing and release those developers' backlogs and future games on Game Pass. If Microsoft owns the intellectual property, it can release a new title on Game Pass on the same day it's sold for $60 or $70 everywhere else, as it plans to do with upcoming hits like Bethesda Game Studios' Starfield. That's a huge incentive to sign up for Game Pass, and it's a viable strategy because Microsoft earns enough revenue through its other products and services to make up for it.
"Now, Microsoft can say, 'Subscribe to us. We've got all these first-party studios and also third-party studios,'" Chapple said. "Subscription potentially also makes gaming a bit more accessible. You're not forking out that $60 or $70 to play one game. You're forking out a monthly fee that's quite low to access a whole variety of games." But Microsoft will still have to convince many more third-party developers to join Game Pass to keep subscriber numbers growing, and that means compensating them fairly so they keep coming back.
Microsoft declined to answer individual questions for this story, but it did provide Protocol a statement on its stance on subscription gaming and the way it compensates developers who join Game Pass. "We strive to build a platform where our creative partners can find success," a company spokesperson said. "Our model for how we support and compensate developers who participate in Game Pass is designed to be flexible and was built based on partner feedback. This includes options like fees, bonuses based on usage, and more."
The big free-to-play question
Game developers have offset rising development costs over the years through the use of microtransactions, such as loot boxes and the selling of cosmetic items like character skins. In fact, many developers have simply taken the path of least resistance and opted to design their games as entirely free to play, monetizing the experience through in-game purchasing. Those kinds of games — Fortnite, Roblox, Call of Duty: Warzone, to name a few — do not require subscription platforms at all because they are already at everyone's fingertips for free.
"Free-to-play doesn't fit into a subscription," Chapple said. He noted that there could be a world in which subscription services cover the cost of some in-game microtransactions, but that would "destroy the design of the game, and just cap revenue." Genshin Impact and PUBG Mobile didn't need Xbox Game Pass to become some of the highest-grossing games in the world. All they needed were apps on multiple platforms and a free-to-play business model.
It's likely more games in the future are modeled after those free-to-play hits rather than designed to be bundled into a subscription platform. But there will always be an appetite for big-budget console titles like Sony's upcoming sequels to Horizon Zero Dawn and God of War that cannot be given away for free.
The same is true for breakout indie hits like developer Acid Nerve's new action-adventure title Death's Door, which launched exclusively this month on Xbox devices and PC for $19.99. Critically, the deal Acid Nerve and publisher Devolver Digital struck with Microsoft did not include availability on Xbox Game Pass.
"There's always a bag of money somewhere involved that entices people to take that risk with their work. A lot of those deals are what are keeping a lot of beloved studios open right now," Ismail said. "For a lot of developers this is sort of the new reality. We're not in the business of selling to consumers. We're in the business of selling to platforms, and platforms monetize those games and hopefully give a kickback."
Still, Ismail said it's not clear how that translates to subscription services, which risk undervaluing games as consumer products in the same way streaming music and television made it easier for more people to stop buying CDs and DVDs.
"I have no idea where this is going. I understand how exclusives work and how people make money off exclusives. But with the subscription models, things are obviously new and shifting to a new place," Ismail said. "That's where we're headed, whether we like it or not. On Xbox, people pay $9.95 or $15. How am I going to compete with my $10 game?"
What's fair compensation in a subscription gaming future?
Concern for indie developers has been a focal point of recent discussions around subscription gaming, especially regarding how those services share revenue. One model, an engagement-based revenue-sharing system, is one that might gain traction.
Google Stadia recently implemented it for its Pro subscription tier, offering developers 70% of revenue based on how many days a subscriber signs into the game on Stadia. It's extra revenue for game makers, but it also evokes controversial models like that of Spotify, in which musicians are paid fractions of a penny per stream.
"I feared this day. I warned about this for years and feel no one really took it seriously. Devs being paid based on playtime is the true horror of the subscription-based future — it's the death of creativity, of shorter experiences. I hate this with every fibre of my being," gaming news curator Ryan Brown tweeted on the day of the announcement.
Brown told Protocol he now understands that Stadia Pro also involves other financial incentives brokered directly with Google, and that the revenue a game developer earns isn't solely from the revenue share. But, he said, "I still have very serious concerns regarding monetizing playtime like that. Seems inevitable that'll become the future focus of streaming subscription services."
It should be noted that Stadia Pro is much different than Game Pass, and concerns about its revenue-sharing model do not foretell what Microsoft might implement, though the company did tell Protocol it has "bonuses based on usage." Unlike Game Pass or other cloud offerings, Stadia Pro adds a small number of free games every month and advertises its $9.99 subscription mostly as a way to get discounts on full-price purchases and added benefits like 4K resolution support. In that way it is more similar to platform services like Sony's PlayStation Plus and Microsoft's Xbox Live Gold.
"Our goal while creating Stadia's new 70% revenue-share program was to be as fair as possible, with engagement measured via session days to ensure that different types of game genres weren't adversely impacted," said Alan Joyce, Google Stadia's senior product manager. "For example, if we had merely measured engagement based on total time played, then partners offering narrative-focused RPGs might see drastically more revenue than those with games from pick-up-and-play genres like roguelikes."
Joyce said that "ultimately, no one measure approach is perfect," and the company says it has other methods for generating revenue, like a new affiliate program and a more generous revenue share on full-game purchases.
Still, if the industry does shift toward subscription models en masse, it will likely involve standardized rates, something gaming platforms have resisted and game developers clearly fear. "Even if it's daily, a player might finish [an indie game] in one day or several days. They're not coming back day after day every month. That developer gets a small share of the pie," Chapple said. "It's up to the developer to see if that undervalues their product."
"Platforms right now need to aggressively court developers. At some point they're going to hit a critical mass, and they wouldn't need to do that anymore. At that point, we're at the mercy of the people running those platforms," Ismail said. It's not exactly a rosy future, and he admitted it's not one small developers are being given much of a choice about. But he added the silver lining is that game makers are used to maneuvering such tectonic shifts in the business, and that one way or another, the people who create video games will figure out how to survive.
"Games are woefully unorganized. We don't have the protections that movies or music have," Ismail said. "But we are relatively flexible and pretty adaptive."
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