When YouTube launched a beta of Shorts in India in September 2020, a vertical feed of videos up to fifteen seconds, it was not introducing a new format. The announcement itself described Shorts as “a new way to express yourself in 15 seconds or less”, with viewers able to “easily swipe vertically from one video to the next”. But YouTube did not invent that format. It took it over from TikTok, which had itself grown by taking things over.
This week, a company account on LinkedIn, Kleo's Playbooks, put a name to it. Under the headline “Top 0.1% creators steal (a lot)”, it argues that the most successful creators take hooks, packaging and product ideas, and add their own perspective, personality and examples. The phrasing is provocative, but it describes a real mechanism. The format is cheap to copy. What differentiates is what cannot be copied.
The chain of borrowing in short video
The vertical short video that now runs on every major platform does not have a single author. ByteDance bought the American app Musical.ly in November 2017 for just under $1 billion and merged it with TikTok in August 2018. The short vertical video format that popularised Musical.ly among Western teenagers was thus taken over by an app with reach in Asia.
Two years later, YouTube took over the same format. The description of Shorts in its own announcement is in effect a description of TikTok. The chain runs from one app to the next, and no one in it reinvented the format. Each link in the chain added its own audience and distribution.
The same pattern in art and books
Borrowing proven forms is not a speciality of social networks. Banksy said of the French street artist Blek le Rat, “Every time I think I've painted something slightly original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well. Only twenty years earlier.” Blek le Rat began working with stencils on the streets of Paris in the early 1980s and is regarded as the father of the stencil technique, which Banksy made famous a generation later.
The same goes for the bestselling books on productivity. James Clear openly admits in Atomic Habits that he took the technique of “habit stacking” from B. J. Fogg of Stanford, who called it “anchoring” in his work. Clear directly refers readers to Fogg's Tiny Habits programme. A book that sold millions of copies builds on a model of behaviour that existed before.
The most quoted formulation on this came from Steve Jobs. In the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds he said, “Picasso had a saying, ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’, and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” The writer Austin Kleon carried the idea into the contemporary vocabulary of creators. His book Steal Like an Artist, from 2012, rests on the thesis that no idea is original and every work builds on what came before it.
What cannot be copied
In the same book, Kleon distinguishes good borrowing from bad. Bad is copying someone else's work and passing it off as your own. Good is studying someone else's form, crediting the source and transforming it into something of your own. That difference is the whole point. Kleo's Playbooks puts it the same way: “They're NOT plagiarising. They're putting their own spin on pre-validated ideas.”
A pre-validated format therefore works as a starting line. A hook that demonstrably works reduces the risk that a video or article goes unread. What follows it, the perspective, concrete examples and personal experience, decides whether the reader remembers the author or only the format. In the discussion under the post, a comment by the user Kanak, who describes themselves as “LinkedIn Growth for Founders”, summed it up: “Formats and hooks can be borrowed. Reputation can't. Over time, people don't follow creators because of the template they use. They follow them because of the consistency of their ideas.”
European creators play on foreign platforms
For the European market, the pattern has a concrete consequence. The formats and the platforms on which competition takes place arose outside Europe. Musical.ly and TikTok belong to China's ByteDance, while YouTube and Instagram are American. A European creator does not start by inventing distribution. They start with a ready-made format, and their advantage lies in language, local references and context that a global creator from California or Shanghai does not have. The format is imported, the differentiation is domestic.
In this respect the creator economy is coming close to the logic of start-ups. A proven model, executed faster, more cheaply or for a different audience, is a more common route to a new company than a completely new idea. A creator who takes a working format and fills it with their own perspective does the same. The format is common property. Consistency of ideas, and the name readers associate with them, remains the only thing competitors cannot copy.
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