CapCut and TikTok Are Tearing Apart the Competition. Their Strategy: Turning Everyone Into Video Editors

Nothing seems to stop ByteDance—at least not until the U.S. decides to ban it. After the resounding success of TikTok, the developers of this social media platform launched CapCut as a complementary tool for posting content. And then this app changed everything.

A runaway success. The video editing app, which first arrived on smartphones, has become the big player in the segment. As reported by Bloomberg, CapCut has more than 300 million monthly active users. It dominates the phone video editing market, with 81% market share, according to the market research firm Sensor Tower.

Adobe is trembling. CapCut’s success is troubling for Adobe, which dominates the professional market but is slowly losing popularity with end users. While the smartphone doesn’t seem ideal for video editing, CapCut has proven otherwise. How? By going in the opposite direction of Premiere Pro and other advanced alternatives.

Simplicity wins. Instead of trying to offer a Premiere-like app for smartphones, CapCut reduces the options, simplifies the interface, and proposes more limited features that are perfect for phone users. Its focus on smartphones has meant that it’s not trying to compete with Premiere or Final Cut Pro but rather offer an alternative explicitly designed for beginner video editors. That’s what allowed it to win the game.

And then there’s TikTok. CapCut wouldn’t have had this success if TikTok hadn’t taken the social media world by storm. ByteDance’s offering of a simple tool to edit and publish videos on TikTok has been an enormous success. It has a winning and compelling combination on its hands.

CapCut for desktop. For a few months now, CapCut has been offering its video editor for Windows and MacOS. This app is an excellent alternative to advanced software from Adobe (Premiere Pro), Blackmagic Design (DaVinci Resolve), and Apple (Final Cut Pro) because it adapts the benefits of the smartphone version to desktop but takes advantage of the work space of laptops and desktop PCs. There’s even a slightly more ambitious version with a monthly subscription fee of $9.99.

Adobe (and the others) are trying to react. Bloomberg reports that Adobe is working on a more modest version of Premiere that runs in browsers. However, it can’t compete in the phone video editing market. According to Sensor Tower, its apps have just 2% of CapCut’s active users.

There are no competitors. Other competitors don’t even seem to want to enter this war and are focusing on more ambitious apps. Canva, one of the most attractive startups, has grown in video editing for social media platforms. However, its online video editor still doesn’t match ByteDance’s native phone app. For example, DaVinci Resolve and Final Cut Pro are available for iPads but don’t compete directly with CapCut.

Less is more. The Chinese company’s tool dominates our smartphones with the same principle: Simplicity and fewer options to keep things from getting complicated. It has turned us all into potential video editors. While editing a video with Premiere Pro can be “scary,” CapCut has become the editor that everyone is able to use right out of the box. And that’s a win.

This article was written by Javier Pastor and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.

Images | Xataka On

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