Jan 17 (Reuters) - TikTok fans in the U.S. are racing to

secure alternatives and safeguard their digital empires ahead of

a looming shutdown on Sunday, evoking the chaos of India's 2020

ban that erased the app from the lives of 200 million users

overnight.

While the U.S. ban has been debated for months, India acted

swiftly in June 2020 to block TikTok and nearly 60 other Chinese

apps over national security concerns, stripping many creators of

their main source of income and shattering a digital community.

The disruption forced content creators to rebuild their

followings and businesses on new homegrown apps and established

platforms such as Meta-owned Instagram, which emerged

as a big winner of the ban. While top influencers successfully

made the switch and even expanded their audiences, smaller

creators struggled to achieve the same success.

Gaurav Arora, who had 10.8 million followers on TikTok and

bears an uncanny resemblance to Indian cricketer Virat Kohli,

said he had to act quickly.

"I used to earn between 100,000 and 200,000 Indian rupees

($1,155 to $2,310) per month on TikTok," said Arora, who shifted

to platforms such as YouTube where he now boasts 11.3 million

subscribers.

The vacuum left by TikTok drove a surge toward domestic

platforms like Moj and Josh, especially in India's smaller towns

and rural areas, where TikTok had transformed locals into stars,

showcasing everything from dance routines to personal stories.

Moj and Josh, launched just a month after the ban, have seen

lifetime downloads of roughly 360 million and 308 million,

respectively, in the country, according to market intelligence

firm Sensor Tower.

"TikTok in India catered to every demography and every type

of user, not just tier-1 cities. That's why other applications

like Moj were quickly able to take advantage of the ban," said

Priya Adivarekar, a digital creator and visiting faculty at

Xavier Institute of Communications in Mumbai.

In the U.S., a similar trend is unfolding as millions of

"TikTok Refugees" sign up for the Chinese social media app

RedNote.

However, experts caution that the user experience on these

new apps often falls short of what TikTok had provided, allowing

U.S. tech giants to fill the gap. Instagram Reels, a TikTok-like

service launched in August 2020 just months after the Chinese

app was banned in India, has found its biggest audience in the

country.

"The only beneficiary (of the ban), if there was any clear

beneficiary from this, did seem to be Instagram," said Apar

Gupta, observer trustee of Internet Freedom Foundation, an

Indian advocacy group.

"The greater loss was to the people of India. ByteDance

completely pulled out of India. You didn't have people having

the ability of engaging in content or a creator economy to the

same extent that others had," he added.

While TikTok's overall impact on India's economy before the

ban is unclear, the company estimates that it drove $15 billion

in revenue for U.S. small businesses in 2023 and contributed

about $24 billion to the world's largest economy.

"For top influencers, these platform disruptions matter a

little less, especially since they are already present on a

bunch of platforms," said Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor

of Information Science at Cornell University.

"The impact on the micro-influencers and the mid-tier

influencers is going to be much stronger. I see similar ripple

effects both in the U.S. and in India."

($1 = 86.5660 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh, Arsheeya Bajwa, Kritika Lamba and

Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni and Anil

D'Silva)