The Strategy Behind TikToks Global Rise

In 2020, TikTok was among hundreds of Chinese apps barred in India after deadly clashes on the country’s border with China. These concerns have been echoed by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies – including by the FBI director this week – as well as regulators elsewhere. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights.

The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions of users. Bytedance believes that its algorithmic approach to content could work around the world, and it has developed Toutiao-like apps for other markets. Helo, for example, is a similar product aimed at India with support for 14 local vernaculars, and TopBuzz does a similar thing in English. But so far, its highest-profile efforts in Western markets have focused on creative communities. The company bought short movie-making app Flipagram last year and rebranded it as Vigo Video, then followed up by acquiring Musical.ly to merge with its similar service Douyin.

Since it launched in 2012, Toutiao has accumulated hundreds of millions of daily active users who are hooked on its personalized blend of articles. This English-language version of Toutiao is aimed at offering curated news from media partners and independent content creators to the overseas market. While ByteDance hopes the app can replicate the success of Toutiao in the US, it only recently started gaining traction, with 36 million monthly active users currently, compared with just 1.8 million in November 2017. The growth apparently is not enough for its ambitious owner, which reportedly was looking to sell the app last year.

TikTok

TikTok has said this is a requirement under Chinese law and does not impact ByteDance’s international operations. In March, its subsidiary Lark Technologies launched a product called Lark, a productivity and workplace collaboration tool. Yet the discussions taking place with Microsoft about the possibility of buying TikTok’s US operations show it is one of the most significant technology products in years.

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That 1 percent stake also came with a board seat in ByteDance’s Chinese entity, tech news website The Information reported in 2021. A Chinese state-owned entity owns 1 percent of Douyin, according to the ByteDance website. TikTok has said this is a requirement under Chinese law and does not impact ByteDance’s international operations. ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years. Tencent is the average true range most valuable company of any sort in Asia, but Bytedance has beaten it to the punch with TikTok, allowing it to claim a degree of greater influence on the wider social networks of the world.

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In the most recent clash this summer, Bytedance accused Tencent of blocking TikTok videos from its platforms, including dominant messaging app WeChat; Tencent retorted by suing Bytedance for libel and anti-competitive practices. Then in 2017, the privately-owned tech company bought a US-based video startup and released TikTok as the overseas version of berkshire hathaway letters to shareholders Douyin. It also bought popular lip syncing app musical.ly, and moved those users onto TikTok in 2018. The app started off as a Q&A site embedded in Toutiao in 2016 and quickly took off, with over 10,000 questions posted (link in Chinese) on the platform by March 2017, and more than 100,000 answers added every day. Taking note of its strong growth, ByteDance spun the feature out from Toutiao that year.

1. For them, it’s not about winning the attention of big brands – it’s about finding like-minded people.
2. Downloads of shortform video app competitors Byte and Triller have spiked in the US as users prepare themselves for jumping ship.
3. The app has been a diplomatic hot potato between the United States and China since the administration of former president Donald Trump, who once wanted to ban the app.
4. In 2018, ByteDance hit the lower end of its revenue target of 50 billion to 55 billion yuan ($7.2 billion to $7.9 billion), according to a Bloomberg report.

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 mobile videos worldwide. Together these apps account for 1.5 billion monthly How to buy baby dogecoin active users, the company says, and about 700 million daily active users. 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).

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. Much of TikTok’s popularity came from viral videos that were shared by Internet influencers and social media stars who had millions of followers. TikTok’s popularity also increased considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of housebound social media users turned to their phones for entertainment. In 2020 ByteDance released CapCut, a video-editing software with more than 200 million monthly active users. 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.