SVP Prabhakar Raghavan recently said that according to the company’s internal studies, 40% of young people, when looking for a place for lunch, go first to TikTok or Instagram over Google Maps or Search.

Whoever masters video search will unlock a compelling wedge into in-app commerce and be able to monetize the intent of their users.

If a social company were to figure out how to keep their customers’ actions inside of their app, then they could expand their business into commerce and payments, the consumer wallet, and other extremely lucrative features.

Thanks to its infamous algorithm, the Bytedance-owned video platform now has over a billion global monthly active users, and kids and teens reportedly spend an average of 91 minutes watching TikTok per day (versus an average of 56 minutes per day on YouTube).

Imagine if every piece of video user-generated content (UGC) had a location tag that could redirect to a voucher or other deal. Merchants would benefit, because they would suddenly have a vast number of new, free, and seemingly less-biased UGC “ads” every day for their products/offerings, courtesy of their own customers.

Search on Douyin—which has 600 million daily active users—has been a mainstream and popular behavior for years.

thanks to the algorithms and user behavior on Douyin, the app can push new places to a user that he or she would never have thought to search for. Short video effectively enables the continuous discovery of the best places around you, and it gets better with every swipe as the platform better understands you and your interests.