Why Zynn’s $2 billion Bet to Compete with TikTok Failed

The Zynn mission statement declares: “At Zynn, spark your creativity and fully express yourself!”

I take them up on their promise, downloading the app within a few weeks of its release. I was one of many; when Zynn hit the app store in May, it immediately skyrocketed to number one on the entertainment chart. Zynn is basically TikTok with a twist: in the first few months of the app, it paid users to “engage” with content. The pay rate was abysmal — up to one dollar a day for watching videos — but with a pyramid scheme business model; you could earn up to $20 if a friend used your referral code.

Zynn was shameless in its imitation, copying TikTok’s interface down to the app’s central “For You” page — an endless feed of 60-second-or-less videos curated by Zynn/TikTok. But despite surface level similarities, Zynn brought out something far more toxic in its users. My feed was flooded primarily with blurry, stolen TikToks, posted to boost the user’s “engagement” points and earn them money. Beneath them were dozens and dozens of comments begging “F4F [Follow for follow] let’s get this MONEY.” My personal favorite, and one of the few that suggested a human behind the account, was from “DirtyBoye,” who shouted into the void, “Am I engaging?”

Zynn should’ve been better than this. It’s origin story is essentially a tale of two powerhouse rival Chinese companies — Kuaishou and ByteDance — vying for the North American market. Kuaishou was reportedly given a $2 billion dollar investment to try and siphon some of the massive American engagement ByteDance had acquired with Tiktok. To my frustration — and the dismay of American politicians — both companies are notoriously cagey with their business models. But for whatever ends Zynn was built to achieve, it failed to “spark” much creativity.

Jerry Lan, a TikTok creator with over 100,000 followers, was one of the only people I could track down who had actually posted videos on Zynn (with no messaging feature, it’s almost impossible to contact users). However, his foray into the app was short-lived.

“On TikTok, when you make videos, it’s a lot more simple to edit them. You can find sounds pretty easily, you can do trends,” he said. “Whereas with posting on Zynn, […] I couldn’t do a lot of things with it.”

Lan told me how, unlike on TikTok, there was no “duetting” on Zynn — a feature that allows users to reply to other videos — nor did it have the same giant library of filters. He actually called me back after our interview to list more issues: no search bar, no spam control for comments, and sounds would play from the app after he had navigated away from it. (The same thing happened to me a week in, when I heard a baby’s shriek come from my pocket. She was being tickled in a Zynn clip and wouldn’t stop until I closed the app completely.)

I realized talking to Lan that Zynn wasn’t an exact copy; it was the product of a company who thought TikTok’s audience could be bought — a slapdash money grab that somehow left behind all the features that supported creativity and collaboration. After all, Zynn was literally going to pay Lan to create, yet he found it so difficult to make videos that it wasn’t worth it to him. Another TikToker Humphrey Yang said he never bothered posting to Zynn because the audience was just there to make money. According to him, “there’s no sense of community.”

“If you grow the audience on TikTok organically, […] your organic following has loyalty to you,” he said. “Not because you’re offering them some sort of cash to do it.”

Yang has posted dozens of personal finance explainer videos on TikTok without the app paying him a cent. He now has over half a million followers and his comments are filled with genuine questions, ranging from how to better invest to Yang’s favorite color.

I reached out to him after seeing his review of Zynn on Youtube. While other creators raved about the app and then instructed their followers to use their referral code, Yang called it a “dumbed down version of TikTok” with a “really shitty hourly rate.”

The response? Three thousand comments of people advertising their own Zynn referral codes. “It was crazy,” Yang said. “I thought they would all be robots, but it’s just people, you know, googling ‘Zynn app’ and my video pops up second or third.”

He paused for a moment. “People don’t seem to care, I guess, about the review. They just wanted to put their comments in there.”

I think about what I wanted Zynn to be: TikTok, but without the original sin. It’s well-documented that TikTok’s rise was accompanied by racist, ableist, and overall discriminatory processes. According to The Intercept, moderators were literally told to filter “abnormal body shapes” or people who filmed in “slums.” The app has supposedly updated its policies since then, but only after major pushback from TikTok users.

Despite that, TikTok has fostered amazing communities. Every day I see songwriters going viral from their bedrooms and others “duetting” them to add harmonies or rap verses. In the last few weeks, I’ve been brought to tears by protest videos and watched explainers on systematic racism from teenagers more politically literate than I ever was in high school. While I can’t speak to the intentions of ByteDance — it’s had its fair share of controversy — TikTok has attracted millions of passionate creators who are shaping the world around us.

But what if it had been inclusive from the start? The concept of Zynn felt like a dream thought experiment — a $2 billion dollar do-over, a chance to build an app that encouraged all of its creators.

Apparently that wasn’t Zynn’s goal. With an estimated 5 million iOS downloads in under two months, I’m sure the company deemed it a success. They used an incentive system that worked in making people flock to the app, but failed to develop features that encouraged innovation. I scrolled through Zynn for hours, wondering how many people would stick around when the money ran out.

And then one day it was over. The wave of “let’s get this money” comments were swept away, users replacing it with a new mantra: “Spread the word Zynn has been removed from the App store DO NOT UNINSTALL!!!”

It was true. Zynn was mysteriously removed from the App Store as a result of “plagiarism.” The comments informed me that if I uninstalled Zynn, I could never get it back. I had a brief sense of claustrophobia, like we were all suddenly trapped on this hell app together. But then I lifted my finger, deleted Zynn, and opened up TikTok. The first video on my “For You” page was of a teenager drawing Billie Eilish. All the comments told her it was beautiful.