ok offers a secret heating (cheating) feature. Click //
Forbes reviewed six documents and sources to confirm that employees of TikTok or ByteDance engage in “heating,” a manual process that ensures certain videos get a certain number of views.
Heating is cheating. Six former employees of TikTok, its parent company ByteDance and internal documents reviewed by Forbes show that TikTok staff use heating to increase the distribution of videos. They also rely on the algorithm to decide what becomes most popular.
One of these sources says:
The heating feature is used to boost videos to the For You feed by operation intervention to reach a set number of views,” an internal TikTok document called MINT Heating Playbook explains. The total video views of heated videos account for around 1-2% of daily total video views. This can have a significant effect on core metrics overall.
This information is not disclosed by TikTok. Forbes was told by sources that TikTok used heat to attract influencers. This could have been done to increase the views of the videos of brands and influencers.
Heating suggests that videos on the For You page are not based on personal preference, but may be intended to increase views for certain brands or creators. These videos are difficult to differentiate from regular content without labeling.
Possible abuse cases Forbes has been informed by sources that employees may have used “heating” to increase the view count on their accounts or those of loved ones, in violation of company policies. Forbes reviewed documents that support this claim. Forbes found evidence that employees used heating on their accounts as well as the accounts of friends and family. This type of “heating” incident led to an account receiving over 3,000,000 views, according to one document.
What TikTok did to respond. TikTok responded by saying, “We promote videos to diversify the content experience. We also introduce celebrities to the TikTok Community and help emerging creators. Only a few people based in the U.S. have the ability approve content for promotion. That content accounts for approximately.002% in For You feeds.” Jamie Favazza, TikTok spokesperson, wrote.
Dig deeper. Read the complete Forbes article here.
Why do we care? TikTok artificially increasing the views of certain videos by “heating”, it could cause marketers to use different metrics to assess the success of their campaigns. This could result in brands investing in collaborations or partnerships with influencers and channels that might not have the same audience as they seem to have. In turn, this could reduce their ROI.
Artificially increasing view counts can also lead to misleading metrics or data. This could affect transparency, trust, and reputation of the platform as well as brands that use it.
TikTok secretly “Heating” (cheating) the post Search Engine Land was the first to feature this button.