The surging global popularity of TikTok has seen the co-founder of its parent company, ByteDance, become China’s richest person. With TikTok, rebranded from the joining of Musical.ly and Douyin, Bytedance has a global hit. The company says it racked up more downloads in the US than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in both September and October, and TikTok now has over half a billion people worldwide using it monthly. The app has been downloaded nearly 80 million times in the US, with even the likes of Jimmy Fallon giving it high-profile endorsements. ByteDance has nine months to sell the app to a non-Chinese parent company, or TikTok will be blocked in the U.S. To talk about what the legal complications of such an order are, we bring in Timothy Edgar.
The SFV trend line in China (note 2017 uptick)
- The main source of income for TikTok is through in-app purchases.
- Third, since the primary use case is to read and view content, users are more receptive to seeing relevant targeted ads and therefore there is more inventory available to advertisers.
- 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.
- For starters, the handful of other apps that were in this SFV space had content that was locked in their apps, making scraping hard.
ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people’s lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok. It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company.
TikTok owner ByteDance is a $75 billion Chinese tech giant — here’s what you need to know about it
In fact, China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires Chinese companies to furnish any customer information relevant to China’s national security. TikTok collects astonishing amounts of user information, more than some other popular social media apps. There’s no forex trading vs stock trading evidence that ByteDance has ever turned over this information to the Chinese government. The app enjoyed early success with young Internet users, and its user base grew substantially in 2017, when ByteDance acquired the popular video-sharing app Musical.ly, which it merged with TikTok in 2018.
Bytedance’s rise in China has not been without conflict or controversy, however. The company’s most notable achievement is in gaining its level of success without being How to buy illuvium propped up by any of the country’s internet mega-giants like Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu. Alibaba was turned down this year after expressing interest in an investment or acquisition, according to Reuters, while Tencent is said to have divested itself of a small stake in Bytedance some time ago. Of course, TikTok’s devoted and rapidly growing audience wouldn’t say that the appeal of the app has anything to do with AI.
And combining the network value with a product hyper-optimized for easy adoption, retention, and sharing — TikTok’s growth was off to the races. 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. To understand ByteDance’s astonishing success with TikTok (the internationalized version of Douyin), we first need to go back a couple of years, across the Pacific Ocean to Mountain View, San Fransisco.
More ways to discover content in different niches
“The goal of this acquisition is to incorporate the team’s strength to build upon ByteDance’s initiatives in the education space, specifically for upcoming education hardware,” the spokesperson told CNBC. “As part of this acquisition, the team will be maintaining the Smartisan brand, only in China, for existing smartphone owners.” However, a spokesperson for ByteDance said that it is not working on a smartphone — but it is developing other hardware related to education. Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan. Now, a bill in Congress aims to force the company to cut ties with ByteDance or be barred from the United States. A large number of US lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China.
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). ByteDance, Chinese technology company that developed novel video-sharing social networking applications, most notably TikTok. ByteDance also serves as the parent company of several popular social media and news apps. Perhaps the company’s most famous app is Douyin which was launched in 2016.
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Their 2013 launch, and rapid ascent in the US, was a milestone event for this type of content. In short pace (as we saw in Why Vine Died) they set in motion an explosion in homegrown, experimental, and bite-size content. And they essentially defined the template for successful (despite failing themselves) short-form, mobile-first, video.
ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form axi forex broker mobile videos worldwide. The incident prompted Zhang to publicly apologize for “publishing a product that collided with core socialist values,” and it highlights the potential pitfalls of operating online platforms in China. Tencent has had its clashes with the government, too, most recently being hit by restrictions on video game releases and play time.
It also might deter foreign companies from expanding in America, if they also do business in China, out of concerns they may get either caught in a tug of war or find themselves banned. Each growth inflection there is clearly driven by the launch of a new product, where each one was built on top of this shared middle layer, and existing network of users and data. What’s more, for each new product using ByteDance’s series of shared services (like their recommendation engine), the shared services improved for all the others products too. So, realizing their value—and how much value was moving through their platform—in 2018 ByteDance launched their own comprehensive selling tool to capture more of it. Simply, creators could make Douyin Stores of products, and as people consumed (now shoppable) content, they would get automatic pop-ups and embedded links to directly purchase products inside the app. Of course, leveraging their existing recommendation algorithms to serve users relevant shopping content.