Who Owns TikTok Now?

TikTok Now's history is brief, spanning less than a year from launch to discontinuation. The feature was conceived as TikTok's competitive response to BeReal, a French social media application that had achieved viral growth in 2022 by offering a novel format: once per day, at a random time, BeReal sent users a notification prompting them to simultaneously capture photos with both their front and back cameras within two minutes. The format was designed to encourage authentic, unfiltered sharing rather than the polished, edited content that dominated Instagram and TikTok.

BeReal's growth in 2022 attracted significant attention from larger social media platforms, which recognized the format's appeal to younger users seeking more authentic social media experiences. Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok all launched competing features that replicated BeReal's dual-camera, spontaneous capture format. This pattern of large platforms copying successful features from smaller competitors had been observed repeatedly in social media, most notably with Instagram's adoption of Stories (copied from Snapchat) and Reels (copied from TikTok).

TikTok Now was launched in September 2022, initially as a separate standalone app in some markets and as an in-app feature within TikTok in others. The feature prompted users to capture 10-second videos or static photos using both their front and back cameras simultaneously, mirroring BeReal's core mechanic. TikTok Now was integrated into TikTok's existing social graph, allowing users to share their TikTok Now content with their existing TikTok followers.

The feature launched with TikTok's considerable distribution advantage, as TikTok had approximately 1 billion monthly active users at the time of TikTok Now's launch. This distribution advantage meant TikTok Now was immediately available to a vastly larger potential user base than BeReal had ever achieved. However, distribution alone proved insufficient to drive meaningful adoption of the feature.

TikTok Now failed to gain significant traction among TikTok's user base. The feature's format, which was designed for spontaneous, unedited sharing, was at odds with TikTok's established culture of highly produced, edited short-form video content. TikTok users had come to the platform for entertainment and creative expression, not for the raw authenticity that BeReal's format was designed to capture. The mismatch between TikTok Now's format and TikTok's existing user behavior limited the feature's appeal.

BeReal itself also began losing users in early 2023, with reports indicating a 61% decline in daily active users between October 2022 and March 2023. The broader "authentic social media" trend that BeReal had pioneered appeared to be fading as the novelty wore off and users returned to more established social media behaviors. This decline in BeReal's own user base further undermined the rationale for TikTok Now's continued development.

On June 27, 2023, TikTok sent notifications to users informing them that TikTok Now would be discontinued. The notification did not provide a specific reason for the discontinuation. TikTok Now was shut down approximately nine months after its official launch, making it one of the shorter-lived product experiments from a major social media platform. The discontinuation was widely reported in technology media as a reflection of the broader failure of BeReal-style features across multiple platforms.