Inquiry about the meaning of the result parameter: isAd column

Hi! This data is supposed to represent "Paid partnership" flag. I can see that it's not present on all types of videos, just hashtag videos. I'll take a better look to see if we can add it to the rest

Thank you for attaching the screenshot. However, when loading the video from the link where the isAd column value is TRUE in the crawling results, I cannot find the message shown in the screenshot. Could this be a temporary issue, or could it be an error in the crawling data?

Yes, you're right! We actually take this value directly from TikTok's API. I've compared videos with and without it and couldn't find any certain difference (except for that when it's present it's usually an ad). I'd assume it's just the way TikTok categorizes the video type for itself, but I'm not sure. I incorrectly assumed that it's "Paid partnership" badge. We currently are actually working on extracting it as a separate property (in addition to isAd). You'll see it in changelog when it's done

Let me know if you have other questions

Hi, we've released a new version that scrapes "Paid partnership" flag (except for Search workflows) into isSponsored property. Also, we found an article that mentions what isAd means from Mozilla here (it doesn't give much insight as well) https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/mozilla-investigation-partisan-influencers-dark-money-are-evading-tiktoks-ad-policy/

Let me know if you have other questions by reopening the issue

Hello, thank you for the update. I have an additional inquiry regarding the isAd and isSponsored columns. When the isAd value is True and the isSponsored value is False, upon checking the video, no sponsored label appears. Could it be that the isAd value is related to TikTok’s advertising solution, Spark Ads? If so, does this mean it’s a metric that’s not visibly available on the TikTok site?

Hi! I'm not very much familiar with TikTok's ad solutions, so it could be, but it could also be related to all kinds of ads, not just Spark Ads. As for visibility, I assume that yes (I saw nothing prominent when taking a look) - it's not visible (although I'd expect these videos to appear on https://ads.tiktok.com/ -related pages)