Creator's Guide to TikTok Alternatives
In this blog, we’ll explore TikTok as well as other popular short form content platforms.
Short form content platforms are taking over. As users become increasingly connected and perpetually online thanks to mobile devices, the amount of time they have to dedicate to watching content is at a premium. While long form content like YouTube videos and live streams are still popular, users are increasingly turning to short form platforms like TikTok for fast, quick hits of content. The interest in viral, shareable, high impact clips has increased dramatically. In this blog, we’ll explore TikTok as well as other popular short form content platforms.
Short Form Content Platforms Offer Community
As a creator, it’s important to find good platforms on which to share your short form content. Finding a platform that has a community interested in gaming content is useful to grow your audience and level up as a creator. Whether it’s your best headshots or your funniest moments, you want your content to shine and be appreciated. Views, likes, shares, and interaction with the community are all critical parts of your journey as a creator. These short form content platforms are places where you can grow.
Monetizing Your Short Form Content
Monetization is a key element for any content creator. Currently, short form content platforms offer a range of different value propositions when it comes to monetization, from a share of ad revenue to tipping and creator funds. Creators want to capitalize on their gaming highlights and actually generate meaningful income from their clips. Making it as a creator is difficult, so adding additional ways to monetize will always be very valuable.
What is TikTok?
TikTok is everywhere right now. It captured the imagination of GenZ and the interests of brands worldwide. As the most popular and viral social media platform in the world, TikTok validated the importance of short form content and showed its true value. From the legendary algorithm and “For You Page”, TikTok delivers creators the promises of hundreds of millions of views, likes, and shares and the possibility of going viral and “making it”. The size of TikTok’s community makes it very interesting for short form creators to tap into and there is a substantial interest in gaming content on the platform.
However, TikTok’s allure comes from being the largest and broadest community - there’s something for everyone, so it lacks any gaming specific features. There are no features built to support gaming creators in particular and the community as a whole isn’t necessarily interested in gaming content - more memes, trends, and virality. Your gaming content will also be mixed in with a wide variety of other content.
On TikTok, it’s also difficult to monetize natively despite its massive reach and engagement. Only the largest creators are able to make any revenue from the creator fund, even when getting millions of views on their clips consistently. Payouts are small relative to the size of the reach - because so many moments on TikTok are getting massive reach. Creators get a small slice of the pie despite TikTok’s massive revenue numbers.Smaller creators can earn from virtual currency donations and gifts, but the TikTok still takes a significant amount of that in fees. Creators can monetize via virtual gifts (like Roses) or TikTok Diamonds (their virtual currency used to purchase gifts). Most creators rely on brand deals sourced via agencies, manually, or via partnership platforms.
Alternate Gaming Clip Platforms to TikTok
While TikTok leads the pack with its reach and virality, are there other short form content platforms that creators should consider? We’ve compiled a group of TikTok alternatives. As a creator, it’s important to diversify across different platforms and use the ones that work best for you. For example, TikTok may not be the best fit for all gaming creators due to its broad audience - they may prefer a gaming focused short form platform.
Why Post on Different Gaming Content Platforms?
Having a presence on different short form content platforms is recommended because it allows creators to optimize their content for the different variables on each platform. Some content may work better on TikTok over FreshCut, or on Reels over youTube Shorts. Each platform also has a different community, so posting content to different platforms enables creators to reach a new audience. By increasing the potential community you engage with, you’re widening your funnel as a creator for finding new potential followers and subscribers. Diversifying platforms also reduces a creators dependence on any particular platform for monetization or community. There have been many examples in the past of platform changes, algorithm changes, and product updates that have dramatically impacted creators and their content (ex. Facebook de-prioritizing video sharing from brand pages made many new media brands scramble to find new channels on which to share content in the 2010s). Overreliance on any one platform as a channel for distributing content and engaging with community can have a negative impact if any such worst case scenario should come to fruition.
Each short form content platform has its pros and cons when it comes to its community, monetization features, and gaming-specific nature.
FreshCut
FreshCut is an up and coming short form gaming content platform and community. Unlike other short form content platforms, FreshCut is focused on the gaming audience - creators and fans. This means the product and community on FreshCut is all about gaming. From game-specific tags in the app to weekly game-specific tournaments, FreshCut is building a unique experience for gamers.
Anyone can upload their content to FreshCut. In regards to monetization, FreshCut has its own virtual currency, FreshCut Diamonds, that creators can get tipped with. Creators keep 90% of all tips which is the best revenue share in the market. For FreshCut Partners, they can tap into the $1M Creator Fund, Partner rewards and other benefits.
FreshCut has a vibrant community of gaming fans and creators in its app on Discord. For the community, FreshCut runs events, tournaments, FreshCut Challenges (enter your best clips for different games to win money and gaming rewards) and FreshCut Rising Star (where creators compete to win a share of $10,000).
In the app, FreshCut also offers features like a personalized “For You” feed as well as curated, themed playlists that highlight games, top plays, fails, creators, and more. In-app quests offer rewards to users for watching content and supporting creators, giving them Diamonds that they can tip creators with or use on merch and membership privileges.
Instagram Reels
As TikTok took off, Instagram was watching. So they launched Reels (what some might say was a TikTok clone) to compete. Like TikTok, Reels is all about short form video content, trends, sounds, memes, and virality. Reels is particularly great for creators who already have an established presence on Instagram as it slots directly into your grid and benefits from your audience. The goal, similar to TikTok’s For You Feed, is to get featured in the Discover page or fed to users as suggested videos.
Similar to TikTok, Instagram/Reels is focused on being as large and broad as possible, to serve as many communities and creators as possible. As a result, there’s no gaming-specific features on the platform, but there are a lot of users that are interested in gaming content. Instagram’s massive community of users benefits Reels, meaning if your content catches on, it can get huge views and engagement.
Instagram offers no gaming specific features or community activations and events. There are also few monetization features built into the platform that benefit all but the largest creators, and there is no tipping feature at this time. The majority of revenue creators can derive from their Instagram presence is via brand deals like TikTok.
YouTube Shorts
All the major video content platforms are entering the short form arena and YouTube is no exception. Shorts is a fairly new product by YouTube that’s focused entirely on short form content. It exists within the wider YouTube ecosystem, so it’s a plus (but not required) if you’re already established on YouTube.
YouTube has billions of users, so it offers a major audience to which you can share your short form content. These users may also not be on Reels or TikTok, so it’s advantageous to post content across all the short form platforms. Another bonus for YouTube is that as a part of Google, Shorts are now given prime position in Google searches, another way your content might reach a global audience. Going viral on Shorts offers the same benefits as TikTok, getting huge views and interactions.
Shorts is not gaming specific, like Reels and TikTok it caters to all communities - but YouTube does have YouTube Gaming that supports gaming creators on the platform. There are also some monetization features coming in 2023 - following up on the $100M Creator Fund that YouTube set up specifically for Shorts content. YouTube Partners will be able to earn ad revenue from Shorts in February 2023 and keep 45% of revenue based on a share of total shorts views. Creators will also be able to become YouTube Partners based on their Shorts content.
Medal.tv
Medal is a popular service that creators use to edit and share their gaming content. Medal has robust editing features in contrast to TikTok, Reels, and Shorts, and also has a community with which creators can share gaming content. Users can edit their clip, edit, and share their content on Medal. Unlike the big tech platforms, Medal is focused on the gaming community.
Medal’s content platform enables fans to view, comment, like, and engage with gaming content as well. While Medal’s community lacks the size of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, it is a passionate group of gaming-focused users who may be interested in your content. Medal does not offer any monetization built into their platform at the moment. They previously had a partner program like YouTube and Twitch, but this does not seem to be active anymore.
Conclusion
We’ve covered an overview of TikTok as well as other popular alternatives for short form content platforms. As a creator, it’s recommended to post content across different platforms and see what works best for you. Some offer the allure of virality and massive communities, while others build specifically for gaming creators. Each has their own benefits and downsides, and as a creator, it’s good to see which you prefer. And you can’t forget about monetization. Creators deserved to be rewarded for their great gaming highlights. Posting content across platforms also helps creators to avoid becoming over reliant upon any one platform (and potentially impacted by any future algorithm changes).
Our recommendation would be to check out FreshCut as the home of your short form gaming clips. But we may be biased! We’re building for gaming creators and their communities, prioritizing monetization, and doing things differently.
Most of all - you should choose the platforms that work best for your content and your community. Find your niche and own it!