But, ear always to the ground and hyperaware of the changing landscape, Zhang had been seeing a gradual increase in the popularity of SFV since 2011. And because his initial vision for ByteDance was global, he had a pulse on his market across the world. First, it reduced the impact of monetization on the user experience – and may have actually improved the experience! Users typically consider ads as intrusive and degrading to their experience, but ads aligned with user preferences are less so. In serving ads that are highly relevant to a user’s interests, Toutiao in many ways acts as a product discovery mechanism. When Toutiao launched, they didn’t have any of their own content — it was all third-party stuff being pulled together.
- To test this all out, I created a new account, skipped the interest question, and once the app was downloaded, in 10s I was watching my first video.
- Today, we’ll be tackling what may be our most ambitious deep dive thus far.
- There’s no better evidence of why a government might fear the app’s insidious nature than the fact that TikTok is banned in China itself.
- The conversation devolved into a discussion over how much employees were paid, with one staffer going back-and-forth with senior executives over whether TikTokers were earning less than their counterparts at Google and Facebook.
Perhaps the company’s most famous app is Douyin which was launched in 2016. In July 2018, ByteDance said Douyin and TikTok had 500 million monthly average users (MAUs). That number could now be higher because the company said in January that Douyin alone had 500 million MAUs in China. Founded in 2012 by tech entrepreneur Yiming Zhang, ByteDance quickly launched a suite of apps beginning that same year with https://bigbostrade.com/ Neihan Duanzi, a platform where users shared jokes in the form of short videos, memes and written posts. The Chinese giant is now one of the most valuable private technology firms in the world, reportedly worth $75 billion, and owns a variety of apps from news aggregators to social media services. ByteDance has also been accused of using apps like TikTok to employ intrusive data-gathering techniques.
The popularity of Douyin in China inspired the team to develop TikTok for international audiences. TikTok is an app platform that allows users to post short-form videos and share content from their cell phones. TikTok uses advanced algorithmic methods to predict which videos users will enjoy and thus create a personalized assortment of videos for them to peruse on their “For You” page (FYP). The enterprise messaging and collaboration platform was originally created by ByteDance to meet its internal work demands around 2016. The company started to use the app internally in late 2017, and gradually expanded its development team (link in Chinese) to around 500 people, according to Chinese media company 36Kr. The Chinese app offers information on automobile prices and news, as well as short videos created by users who review the features of different cars.
Coincidentally, just one month before Twitter announced the shutdown of Vine. And still, despite being consistently tagged and evaluated as a news company during fundraising, Zhang was insistent they were an AI company palladium trade in the search and social media business. Most of the time, because of their ecosystem of news and entertainment aggregation products—and being dubbed China’s Content King— they’re considered a (social) media company.
The Business Of
Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan. It’s looking to expand beyond those services to potentially new areas like smartphones, as it looks for further growth areas — but analysts said that could be a tough task. The RESTRICT Act is essentially government nationalization of the Internet and it goes after everything that contributes to individual people’s freedom and safety online.
Xigua Video
Instantly, Zhang made a huge paid-growth push to gain early traction — dropping a hefty $3M per day on Facebook/Instagram ads. Then, in August 2018, Musical.ly stopped its service, and all 100M users and their data were merged into TikTok. By being inquisitive about fluctuations in their data and digging into what people were organically doing on the app, Zhu and his team discovered a game-changing insight; and they leaned in hard. We didn’t add any new features, just made lip sync more prominent in the app.
To put a complicated issue simply, the US government is worried that because TikTok is a Chinese company, they are subsequently “controlled by China”. Meaning, people are worried ByteDance may be forced by the Chinese government to surveil Americans or try to influence them by promoting pro-China or anti-US content. In previous eras, most of the spoils went to the platform’s earliest adopters – mining value gets harder as the platform ages. TikTok, on the other hand, promotes all content regardless of who made it or how many followers [social capital] they have.
Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming in a small Beijing apartment, they are, in fact, an AI company. But they’re doing a pretty good job at operating outside of the current limelight of it all since none of us are including them in the AI conversation. We’re too busy turning a photo of the inside of our fridge into a recipe and getting inundated with more something-something AI tools.
This introduced a basic affiliate model into the platform — another way for creators, and ByteDance, to monetize. But Douyin was quickly claiming more and more of people’s online time, making Douyin an important destination for brands. While Toutiao had become unencumbered by formats and was also pulling in video content, it wasn’t really becoming a platform where a new category of emerging media—short-form video (SFV)—was finding a place. For starters, the handful of other apps that were in this SFV space had content that was locked in their apps, making scraping hard. Second, there was a positioning problem, as SFV was more snackable entertainment value than news.
TikTok’s virtuous growth loop(s), and data network effects
The app says it had over 400 million daily active users as of January, helping it make up nearly 70% of China’s mobile social network users, according to marketing research firm eMarketer. Douyin and TikTok are two separate entities, although some metrics firms club their numbers. At just 10 years old, ByteDance, the most valuable startup in the world, has shattered records for growth. In 2021, with 1.9 billion monthly active users in 150 countries, and an employee base of over 110,000, the company recorded an astonishing $58 billion in revenues. Most users know the company only by its hit short-video app TikTok, which has been downloaded over 3 billion times globally, a feat only exceeded by Meta and its family of apps.
But, as their generative model got better, they soon started using their own AI to create unique content to serve in their algorithms. To get things in motion, Zhang got to work on building ByteDance’s first product, Toutiao (meaning, Today’s Headlines). The Chinese company behind TikTok, currently valued at a whopping $225B, is the most valuable startup in the world. With backing from the likes of Sequoia and Softbank, and employing over 150,000 people across 120 cities, their valuation is greater than the US’s top 3 private unicorns (SpaceX, Stripe, Canva) combined. An investigation into a truly fascinating company that most of us know far too little about.
The team behind the monitoring project — ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department — is led by Beijing-based executive Song Ye, who reports to ByteDance cofounder and CEO Rubo Liang. We believe at ByteDance that high ethical standards and a culture of integrity play a pivotal role throughout the development of the company. Therefore, we have developed the ByteDance Code of Conduct and ByteDance Partner Code of Conduct. Notably, Shou Zi Chew, currently chief executive at TikTok, will no longer be ByteDance’s chief financial officer. Chew, a banking executive who previously worked at Xiaomi as CFO, joined ByteDance in March as its CFO and was made TikTok’s CEO in May.
There’s no better evidence of why a government might fear the app’s insidious nature than the fact that TikTok is banned in China itself. Instead, the Chinese government lets ByteDance use a limited domestic version of the app that’s explicitly subject to state censorship. And even when I used TikTok daily a while back, I didn’t follow a single person. Unlike Instagram, where it’s about seeing your friends and family (at least for me), TikTok is the largest social media company that has little/no reliance on a social graph.
How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup
It came with a huge library of assets (like filters and music) for users to easily create and share up to 40s music videos. In their first year, Douyin had 100M users, with over one billion video views every day. Unlike other platforms, Toutiao didn’t need any explicit user inputs, social graphs, or product purchase history to rely on.