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. Thanks to the addictive content, users spent increasing long time on the App. An active user typically spent more than 60 minutes a day on the platform, only second to Tencent’s Wechat, a social network app for everyday communications. By the August 2016, Toutiao‘s daily active users (DAU) surpassed 60 million, with total users of over 550 million. During 2016, Toutiao also aggressively encouraged content generators such as writers, news reporters and KOLs to set up their accounts on the platform. Leveraging its huge user base, Toutiao shared revenue with the content generators similarly to Youtube, to attract exclusive content and further building its competitive moat.
- Bytedance’s flagship product in China is actually Jinri Toutiao (“Today’s Headlines”), a massively popular news aggregation service that uses AI to track reader habits and push them stories from various sources.
- “Since beginning transparency reporting in 2019, we have received zero data requests from the Chinese government,” a TikTok spokesperson added.
- ByteDance is part of a growing number of Chinese companies setting its sights on overseas markets including the U.S.
The addressable market opportunity for the enterprise business is even larger. ByteDance is reportedly exploring a whole host of new areas that could unlock new monetization potential. 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. Earlier this year the president issued an executive order effectively banning the app’s use in the US, and said he would not allow the app to operate in the country unless it was owned by an American company. If you’re serious about marketing in China, we think it’s worth being familiar with ByteDance. In this post, we take a closer look at who Bytedance is, what you should know about them, and what might happen to TikTok in the US.
How Mentorship Empowers Women Entrepreneurs: Strategies for Success and Growth
It’s one of the largest news aggregation apps in China and is installed on over 250 million monthly unique devices, according to data from Chinese market research firm, iResearch. The US government have long feared that American users’ data cmc markets review trustpilot could potentially be transferred to China, and these fears are possibly not unfounded – but they are also not limited to ByteDance apps. Chinese law requires that technology companies support the government in cases of national security.
With funding from the likes of SoftBank and Sequoia Capital driving the valuation so high, Bytedance won’t have many options other than to eventually file an IPO if it ever wants to raise more cash and return money to investors. But with such a large number of engaged users and a steep upward trajectory, it also shouldn’t have too much trouble finding ways to turn a profit. Booking.com last year said it expected to fall into the gatekeeper group this year due to the addition of more users. “The Commission now has 45 working days to decide whether to designate the companies as gatekeepers.
Xigua Video
Referring to the Chinese server claim by Internet 2.0, a TikTok spokesperson said the IP address cited in the report is in Singapore and the network traffic does not leave the region. This, the order claimed, paves the way for China to track the locations of government employees, build dossiers for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage. “As the geopolitical situation changes I suspect we will see companies such as TikTok will continue to be treated with some caution in the west,” says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University. TikTok collects information on how you consume its content, from the device you are using to how long you watch a post for and what categories you like, and uses that information to fine tune the algorithm for the app’s main feed.
Amidst the coronavirus crisis, while many companies are busy cutting down their workforce, ByteDance in April 2020, announced that it is hiring staff to fill 10,000 vacant posts in different domains. In 2020, ByteDance is planning to hire 40,000 employees, in a bid to match Alibaba’s headcount. Besides, ByteDance is looking forward to strengthening its position in areas such as e-commerce and gaming. But ByteDance’s segue into the sciences could also simply be a way for the Chinese company to improve its goodwill in the U.S. as talks of a TikTok ban loom and the app faces heavy scrutiny for its effect on the American public and discourse, he added. This is not the first time that ByteDance—which established the ByteDance AI Lab in 2016—has ventured into industries that seemingly have little to do with TikTok, Douyin and social media more broadly. For others, data is less of a concern than the platform’s potential for manipulation of opinion.
The Commission will also assess any argument put forward by the submitting companies to rebut the presumption that they should be designated as gatekeepers,” the EU competition enforcer said in a statement. Founder, Chairman, and CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming is an entrepreneur and philanthropist. He completed his graduation (software engineering) from Nankai University in Tianjin.
It’s no wonder that ByteDance decided to replicate this algorithmic personalisation on its other products like Douyin and TikTok – and clearly that was a smart move. House Committee on Energy and Commerce to address accusations that the app is a threat to American national security. Chew downplayed any connection to or favouritism toward China’s government and elaborated on the steps the company planned to take to better protect the data of American users. Despite this reassurance, the U.S. state of Montana passed a law to ban the app in the state.
Shadowfax – How is it Leading as an Indian On-Demand Delivery Platform?
Tencent has had its clashes with the government, too, most recently being hit by restrictions on video game releases and play time. But if Bytedance can make the most of what appears to be a greater agility in operating overseas, that could be a key advantage for the younger company. TikTok recently attained the traditional social network rite of passage of having Facebook brazenly rip it off.
Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have in recent months called for stricter regulation and inquiry. TikTok does not have advertising yet, but a January report from online trade magazine Digiday said ByteDance is now starting to test ads on the platform, which could open a new revenue stream internationally. One of its earliest and core products is interactive brokers Toutiao, or Jinri Toutiao, which literally translates to “Today’s Headlines”. Toutiao is an AI-powered news aggregator, which uses algorithms to curate news articles and videos based on users’ previous behaviour on the app. This high-level of personalisation makes the app highly addictive, with the average Toutiao user spending 74 minutes a day on it.
“Since beginning transparency reporting in 2019, we have received zero data requests from the Chinese government,” a TikTok spokesperson added. But experts and analysts differ in their assessments of the TikTok data issue. Mere weeks after the UK lawmakers expressed their concern, the director of UK spy agency GCHQ, Jeremy Fleming, said he would encourage young people to use TikTok. This reflects a British security establishment view that the app is not problematic because it does not process data in China. The spokesperson declined to comment on the music streaming product report when contacted by CNBC. However, a spokesperson for ByteDance said that it is not working on a smartphone — but it is developing other hardware related to education.
Its troubles in the US have been well publicised, with Trump calling for a ban on TikTok, citing threats to national security and users’ privacy. But Bytedance have also run into trouble in other countries – in India, for example, TikTok was temporarily shut down in April 2019 as a state ruling said it was spreading pornography. TikTok has now been permanently banned in India for the foreseeable future along with 48 other Chinese apps due to rising political tensions between those neighbouring countries. The UK government has also been investigating whether TikTok has deployed sufficient measures to protect children on the app. During the past decade, ByteDance has proven itself time and again to be a spectacularly innovative and successful company.
The valuation is eye-grabbing, to be sure, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suggest that, say, Uber will ultimately be the bigger deal in the future. At this point, though, it wouldn’t be so reasonable to ignore Bytedance altogether. It’s the first Chinese company to tap into the lucrative social media appetite of Westerners, and that could prove to be very valuable indeed. Tencent is the 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. Such companies are required to make their messaging apps interoperate with rivals and let users decide which apps to pre-install on their devices, among other obligations, starting from March 7. And while TikTok has taken steps to distance itself from its Beijing parent company, both the Trump administration and some Republicans and Democrats in Congress fear the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok as a tool to spy on Americans.
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 dowmarkets exceeded by Meta and its family of apps. But ByteDance has actually churned out one wildly successful product after another — among them its initial hit, Toutiao, the most popular news app in China, which today has 320 million monthly active users, and Douyin, a short-video app that preceded TikTok. Respectively, Toutiao and Douyin account for 20% and 60% of the company’s total advertising revenues.
X, ByteDance, Booking.com could face tough EU rules
ByteDance’s ecosystem isn’t limited to just Douyin/TikTok and Toutiao – they also own a myriad of other Chinese apps, such as video app Xigua Video, humour app Pipixia, photo app Qingyan and reading app Tomato Novel. 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 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.
As estimated by mobile app analytics platform Apptopia, one of ByteDance’s top popular products TikTok’s revenue raised by 310% to over $50 million in the last quarter of 2019. Experts at the time told Forbes those moves reflected the Chinese government’s mandate for the country to be a global leader in health by the end of this decade. And while those millions and millions of users no doubt had an enjoyable time watching clips on the addictive social video app, they also generated a colossal amount of data. This attempt to stay low-profile is perhaps to try to deflect the attention of regulators both in China and overseas. 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.