The woman taking over TikTok at the toughest time

Six weeks ago, as TikTok grappled with escalating tensions between the United States and China, the social media app’s top executives huddled together to figure out their next steps.

Vanessa Pappas, 41, was worried. TikTok’s North American business, which she has run since 2018, was dealing with an uproar. President Donald Trump had threatened to ban TikTok because of its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and many of the more than 100 million people who use TikTok in the United States were up in arms.

So in the early hours of Aug 1, Pappas recorded a 59-second video from her home office in Los Angeles to calm the creators on TikTok and its fans. “We’ve heard your outpouring of support, and we wanted to say thank you,” she said in the video, which quickly went viral under the hashtag #SaveTikTok. “We’re not planning on going anywhere.”

Pappas is now repeating that message as she lands in an even hotter hot seat. Last month, Kevin Mayer, TikTok’s chief executive, said he was leaving the company, citing its uncertain political status. Pappas was appointed TikTok’s interim global head, just as the app faces an even murkier future.

Under an executive order from Trump, ByteDance must essentially strike a deal to sell off TikTok’s US operations by Sept. 20; it will have a few weeks after that to close a sale. Yet after weeks of negotiations with potential buyers such as Microsoft, Walmart and Oracle, the discussions were thrown into disarray when the Chinese government signalled that it would weigh in on TikTok’s future.

In a recent 30-minute interview over Zoom from her home, Pappas said TikTok’s predicament was “unique” and described what it was like to navigate it through “a challenging time.” She declined to discuss specifics about TikTok’s deal talks and said she was not involved in them.

Instead, Pappas said, she is focused on what TikTok’s future could look like if the app’s ownership is bifurcated. Most of all, she said, she is doubling down on putting TikTok’s community of creators and users — ranging from those who post videos of cake decorating to those who break dance — first. Pappas later added that she regularly talked to Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder and chief executive, about all of these issues.

To focus on its community, TikTok in July formed a Creator Fund, where creators can earn cash for views, starting with $200 million. And with the pandemic forcing people indoors for the foreseeable future, Pappas said she and her team were working on making TikTok an uplifting place to visit. Last month, the company launched a largest national advertising campaign on television and digital media, highlighting more than 30 popular creators under the tagline “It starts on TikTok.”

“We’ve built this product for hundreds of millions of people, and we’re not looking for that to change,” said Pappas, a former YouTube executive.

But keeping TikTok’s community happy in such a turbulent period may be challenging. Some creators and fans have been rattled by Trump’s moves against the app. Since his executive order, people in the United States have installed TikTok about 6.5 million times, down 13% from a year earlier, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm.

Competitors have also pounced. Facebook introduced Reels, a TikTok clone inside Instagram, in August. The social network has also doled out millions of dollars to some of TikTok’s biggest stars to lure them over to using Reels.

Vanessa Pappas, general manager of TikTok North America, at the company’s office in Culver City, Calif, Sept 8, 2020. Pappas is keeping a focus on the app’s community of creators and users as it deals with pressure from President Trump, Beijing and a possible sale. (Rozette Rago/The New York Times)

Pappas said she wasn’t worried about Facebook and Instagram Reels. “You can certainly copy a feature, but you can’t copy a community,” she said. “I think that’s really hard to replicate.”

Tom Keiser, chief executive of Hootsuite, a social media management company, said TikTok was right to make its power users a priority.

“They need to be investing in those folks,” he said. “There’s so many things out of their control, but their future growth is based on influencers and content creators continuing to evolve and grow and leverage the new capabilities TikTok is rolling out.”

Pappas has worked in the online influencer world since some of its earliest days. Half Greek by birth, she grew up in Australia and speaks with an Aussie twang. She moved to London when she was 20, and eventually migrated to New York. In 2007, she joined Next New Networks, a company that helped web video creators earn money from their efforts.

YouTube bought Next New Networks in 2011. Pappas joined YouTube and quickly rose through the ranks. She was YouTube’s first audience development lead, a role that led her to connect with video makers. Her division at YouTube developed and popularised the term “creator” and helped transform video blogging, or vlogging, into a full-time job.

Pappas also wrote a book, “The YouTube Creator Playbook,” on how creators could make money from their followings, in 2011. She went on to develop YouTube’s Creator Academy, an educational content portal that teaches creators how to build a business on YouTube, and a channel certification program, which teaches creators about digital rights management, legal issues and advanced analytics.

TikTok lured her from YouTube at the end of 2018 to be its general manager and head of North America, based in Los Angeles. At the time, TikTok had just expanded globally. It was a new challenge for Pappas, who said she had wanted to get in on the ground floor of the next big creator movement.

Pappas said that unlike Facebook or Twitter, TikTok wasn’t wholly dependent on one’s social graph, or how many friends someone had. The app’s discovery algorithm instead surfaces popular trending content from people with followings both large and small, keeping users in the app longer and coming back more frequently.

“Anyone feels like they can be a creator,” said Greg Justice, TikTok’s head of content programming. “I’ve had friends with only a few followers who have gone viral.”

Justice, who works closely with Pappas, said that her leadership style was driven by data and that she often asked people to provide information to back up their projects and proposals. That helped the company avoid allowing dominant personalities and workplace politics dictate the way it was run, he said.

“She really democratises the decision-making and leads to more objectivity at the company,” Justice said.

© 2020 The New York Times Company