TikTok avenue of earning

Over the last year, the biggest TikTok stars’ earnings have surged, driven partly by their efforts to broaden their fame beyond the platform that first turned them into celebrities. Altogether, the highest-paid TikTok stars collectively earned $55.5m in 2021, up 200pc from the last time we counted up their paychecks, in 2020. And while they’ve focused their attention away from TikTok, they still earn much of their money — typically 30pc to 50pc — from sponsored content, where a corporation pays for a post advertising their goods on a star’s social media account. As TikTok has grown to over 1bn users worldwide, businesses like Amazon, Louis Vuitton and McDonald’s have bought such ads. The TikTok stars can charge as much as a half-million dollars for a single post, though most generally earn an average of between $100,000 to $250,000 per post, more than double the rates from that previous list in 2020.

(Adapted from “Top-Earning TikTok-ers 2022: Charli And Dixie D’Amelio And Addison Rae Expand Fame — And Paydays,” by Abram Brown and Abigail Freeman, published on January 7, 2022, by Forbes)

Support for small firms

Size-based industrial policy (support for small firms) has long been provided by the government in Pakistan while age-based policy (support for young firms) has become prominent in recent years. Both policies are typically justified by reference to positive effects on labour absorption. Despite their popularity among policymakers, however, the empirical basis for such policies has not been adequately analysed at the national level. A study addresses this issue using data from a large, multisector, random sample of manufacturing firms and find empirical support for size-based policies but not for age-based ones. It also finds that size-based policies appear most relevant for firms with less than fifty workers. While it did not find age to be a significant determinant in the full sample, it may be significant for sub-samples focusing on specific sectors and types of firms — for example, smaller, younger and innovative firms exhibit much higher employment growth than the sample average in Pakistan’s textiles and apparel sector.

(Adapted from “Size And Age As Determinants Of Employment Growth Among Manufacturing Firms In Pakistan,” by Aadil Nakhoda, Farrukh Iqbal, published in 2021, by Pakistan Institute of Development Economics)

The Apple brand

Soon after 19-year-old Adele Lowitz gave up her Apple iPhone 11 for an experimental go with an Android smartphone, a friend in her long-running texting group chimed in: “Who’s green?” The reference to the colour of group text messages — Android users turn Apple’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue — highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated, and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends. That pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have, with little fanfare, built iMessage into one of the world’s most widely used social networks and helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users in the US.

(Adapted from “Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble,” by Tim Higgins, published on January 8, 2022, by The Wall Street Journal)

Why we miss deadlines

No one intentionally sets out on a new project thinking it’s NOT going to go as planned — and yet it happens again and again. This is because of the planning fallacy. Research shows that we often underestimate the time and obstacles involved in completing a task, even when it directly contradicts our past experiences. So ... how do we stay on track and meet our goals? 1) Take the outside view: This is grounded in objectivity, data, and statistics, not our own experience or personal biases. 2) Commit early and publicly: Give yourself a little bit of external pressure to not leave all of your work to the last minute. 3) Schedule buffer time: To ensure that you meet your deadlines, estimate how long it will take to finish a task, and increase that time by 25pc. 4) Assume the worst: Start by imagining what will go wrong before it actually does. And you’ll be equipped to develop a suitable backup plan as a preventative measure.

(Adapted from “This Is Why You Keep Missing Deadlines,” by Kristi DePaul, published by Harvard Business Review Ascend)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, January 17th, 2022