Poor TikTok showing foreshadowed CNN's failed streaming experiment

A month after the new streaming service CNN+ took flight it sputtered back to Earth and ultimately was grounded, with execs announcing its shuttering this past week.

The reasoning behind the failed experiment has and will continue to be debated:

• Do people really want yet another streaming service?
• Was the price right?
• Was not including the option to view a live CNN broadcast as part of the subscription the death knell?

Whatever the reason, CNN's lagging social media numbers, particularly on TikTok, when compared not only to competitor networks but its own journalists likely could have served as an indicator that the news giant's digital house isn't in order.

With 343,000 followers on TikTok, CNN lags well behind some its own correspondents. For instance, CNN London anchor Max Foster has more than 720,000 followers on his own.

Here's where CNN's TikTok following stacks up against network competitors:

• @nbcnews: 2.6M
• @cbsnews: 2.5M
• @abcnews: 2.2M
• @msnbc: 668K
• @cnn: 343K
• @foxnewschannel: 29K
• @cnbc: 6K

And that's just the traditional networks.

There are dozens if not hundreds of reporters, each with significant following, churning out amazing content on TikTok along with upstart distribution hubs like NowThis Politics, which has more than 2.7M followers.

At the end of the day consumers are changing their news consumption habits, a trend that has been heightened by the content coming out of Ukraine.

As a March headline in The New Yorker stated, the world is "Watching the World’s “First TikTok War.”

With that journalists and media arms are having to adjust how they distribute their content, and the answer apparently at this moment isn't another streaming service.