TikTok is shifting advertising to YouTube after Meta says 'no thanks'

Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has blocked Shou Zi Chew's company, TikTok, from advertising in some markets.

Finn Gomez/Getty Images; Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images TikTok is moving on quickly after losing access to Meta's ads platform in some markets.

It's shifted ad spend to YouTube, Pinterest, and mobile-app networks, according to Sensor Tower.

TikTok was a prominent ad spender on Meta before its ousting on October 8.

TikTok's message to Meta : If you won't take our ad dollars, your competitors will.

Meta took a bold stance this month by blocking ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, from running ads on Meta apps in some markets.

Why? Well, Meta's answer was pretty straightforward.

It didn't want to "run ads from a competitor whose goal is to pull people off our apps." TikTok is now redirecting that ad spend elsewhere.

Since the ban went into effect on October 8, TikTok has shifted its ad budgets to other platforms like YouTube and Pinterest, according to allocation estimates provided to CMO Insider by the analytics firm Sensor Tower.

The share of TikTok's ad spend that went to YouTube rose to 17% between October 9 and October 16, up from 9% in the first week of October.

Meanwhile, its ad spend on Pinterest grew to 9% during the same period, up from 3% in the first week of October.

A majority of TikTok's spend — 58% — went to mobile-app ad networks like Google's AdMob, up from 19% at the start of October, when Meta was still an option.

Meta's move against TikTok "highlights the growing intensity of the competition across the digital landscape and across the two of them," said Kate Black, EVP of social strategy at Horizon Media.

"For marketers, this really just reinforces the need to be agile and build balanced media strategies — and not having all your eggs in one basket." Meta's TikTok ousting isn't unprecedented.