
A study a couple of years ago showed that the average U.S. undergraduate using TikTok would need to be paid about $60 a month to press a button that takes them off TikTok onto a competing platform — they lose that much utility. But if there were a larger button that, when pressed, moved everyone around them off TikTok together, they would be willing to pay you about $30 a month for that to happen. Which means the market is not that TikTok serves its users so well it creates $60 of monthly utility — in fact they lose $30 a month of utility; it is just that switching away alone would cost them even more.