The four twenty-year-olds from Madrid who have created the largest Spanish-language news outlet on TikTok

"Adidas does not appear in the most important photo of the World Cup", begins a recent video from the @ac2ality account on TikTok.

Everything is announced with a

on images of the Argentine team: ”After the furor of the last minutes of the final that gave Argentina the title, it was time to deliver the Cup, but the photo that was going to turn around to the world was not exactly what was expected”.

The cape that the emir of Qatar put on Messi hid the logo of the brand.

The video lasts one minute and has been seen, so far, by more than five million people.

The source, says the video, is the newspaper

, although in reality it is from a website called Direct Marketing, from whose piece they also take out entire sentences in the script.

The impact of the video is certainly much greater than that of the article, since Ac2ality has four million followers on TikTok.

This figure places it as the largest information account in Spanish and the second in Europe, only behind the English

according to a recent report by the Reuters Institute.

In the world there are only five news accounts more followed than Ac2ality: in addition to the

Now This and NBC News (USA) and Metro TV News and Republika (Indonesia).

By video views they are the third medium in the world, only behind NBC and G1-Globo (Brazil) The founders of Ac2ality are four 26-year-olds from Torrelodones (Madrid): Gabriela Campbell, Daniela Álvarez, María Murillo and Paula Muñoz .

TikTok, the short video platform, is the most downloaded global

since 2020. The use of TikTok for any purpose in Spain went from 5% of users in 2020 to 25% in 2022, according to the Digital News Report 2022 from the Reuters Institute.

The explosion of the

has even led it to replace Google in certain age groups.

Among people aged 18-24, the global use of TikTok “for information” is 15%, the highest percentage of all ages.

That group is the main audience for Ac2ality, although they also have a lot of teenagers.

By gender, the audience is strictly divided: 51% women, 49% men.

The four founders recognize that they can live on what Ac2ality provides them.

For a year now, working at the channel has allowed them to generate enough income to become their main job.

That money, they explain, does not come specifically from views or advertising on their TikTok account, but also from

and content creation for others.

They prefer not to talk about specific figures, partly because of the ongoing negotiations, they say, so that the account is acquired by a large group.

How did they get so high?

There are two basic reasons: one, they started in earnest in 2020, when there was hardly any information competition on TikTok.

And two, the language and tone they use.

"The words must be super colloquial," says Campbell by videoconference to EL PAÍS.

“It's a simple vocabulary, we don't take it for granted that fans understand certain terms,” he adds.

That simple language is linked to some background images linked to the news and some meme that flies over.

They also speak faster than, for example, a radio bulletin and do not use an informative tone.

They speak normally.

Its different slogans are "we translate the newspapers", "news in 1 min", "explain it to me easily" and "the 5 things of today".

The rest of their job is similar to any other medium: see what happened, decide what interests your audience, and repackage it.

"I am the editor," says Daniela Álvarez, also by video call.

“I read all the newspapers every day.

There are five news that are repeated, especially international politics.

We usually take those, plus some that we consider interesting for our public, ”she adds.

As also happens to the traditional press, Ac2ality's audience complains in comments about "news" that shouldn't be (for example, Shakira and Piqué's divorce), but later they are among the most consumed.

None of the four founders has studied journalism.

They set up Ac2ality, they explain, because they didn't understand what Brexit was when some of them lived in London, so they decided it would be a good idea to create a

.

Ac2ality started out on Instagram, but its founders quickly saw that TikTok was their platform.

Today Ac2ality follows on Instagram and has accounts on Youtube, Twitch and Twitter.

But none of them have much of an impact compared to TikTok, where they post an average of five videos a day, except on weekends.

On TikTok, as in traditional media, the headline is almost everything.

“At the beginning you must make it very clear what you are going to say.

It is key”, says Álvarez.

“The consensus is that you need to grab attention early, use simple language, have a light touch and be open to conversation to achieve a successful [informative] account on TikTok,” says the Reuters Institute report on press publishers. and TikTok that the journalist Nic Newman has prepared.

“The main thing that journalists can learn from TikTok is new storytelling techniques, more compressed, engaging and fun ways of telling stories.

Also the editing style, the use of music, humor and animation”, Newman explains by email to EL PAÍS.

Ac2ality suffers from two other symptoms of how platforms change, but audience biases with information remain.

First, they perceive a certain concern among their audience to know if they are more of the right or of the left.

“We try to be as objective as possible and that is why we take newspapers of different ideologies.

But there are always those who like us to speak more in a tone of the left or in a tone of the right.

We will do something right because they call us extreme right and extreme left”, says Campbell.

Second, they receive criticism because some believe that with their account they cause young people to read less or take less interest in current affairs.

"On the contrary," says Campbell.

“We give them the opportunity to get informed on TikTok and to generate the desire to learn more about a particular topic,” she adds.

Ac2ality also faces more complicated issues.

The self-imposed limit of one minute per video is sometimes impossible to meet.

They have, for example, a four-minute video on the history of ETA: "It has happened very rarely that it is impossible to explain something in a minute," says Álvarez.

“Now we are doing one about the Vietnam War with crafts.

They usually last a minute and a half or two.

At least you can't.

If I see that it happens, I prefer to make it a little longer, like the ETA one.

It would not be well explained.

If we did it in less time, we would have comments attacking us, ”he explains.

The Ac2ality account makes videos that are actually ads, but they don't describe them as such so as not to lose views.

"Supposedly, it is obligatory to warn about it, but since it was as natural as explaining that a movie is opening, we did not want to put it because the algorithm punishes you," says Álvarez.

“If you put it in the

, it gets it.

They put that video behind you.

Many companies trying to break into TikTok get desperate for views.

And then they pay [the network].

That is why the algorithm tends to throw it back when it detects other advertising, ”he explains.

As of the publication of this article, the account's ads are already designated as “paid collaboration”.

Revenue enhancement has little debate within Ac2ality.

The way out to monetize the project is to jump to a large group.

"Someday a group will tell us that it doesn't reach our

and it will be easier for them to acquire us," says Álvarez.

“It has already happened to us that a large group of press literally knew who we were, they watched us, we were consultants and they ended up creating a new young outlet by copying us”, he explains.

Next time it won't be like that.

The founders complain about how several media outlets have already copied them, including some traditional ones: "Our own followers wrote to us to explain that they were copying us as is: they use the application with which we edit the videos, the format or a type of image characteristic that we added that go in and out of the screen.”

These outlets focused on TikTok and with several members who must make a living from it, find it difficult to monetize that does not go through successfully jumping to other platforms, something that Ac2ality does not do: "It is very difficult for us to create a community on other networks," says Paula Muñoz.

”The movement of followers from one platform to another is impossible.

Thus, if we publish on Instagram, it reaches other types of followers, which are not the same as on YouTube, for example”.

Newman sees the same problems on the road to monetization.

If not moving to other platforms, there are at least two other options: “TikTok is useful for demonstrating that you can build large audiences and a lot of the socially native brands are hoping they can capitalize on this in other ways, which may include selling their audience to brands. or sell your skills and understanding to others,” he says.

Ac2ality expects to opt out soon.

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