ByteDance also serves as the parent company of several popular social media and news apps. Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have jabbed at each other in public, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against one another. During the past decade, ByteDance has proven itself time and again to be a spectacularly innovative and successful company. This has been true not only for TikTok but many of its other apps, which have vast numbers of users.
HOW HAVE BYTEDANCE AND TIKTOK RESPONDED?
Thanks to the explosive growth of these apps, ByteDance has branched out into e-commerce and travel bookings and also released a video editing app. 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. Of course, TikTok’s devoted and rapidly growing audience wouldn’t say that the appeal of the app has anything to do with AI. But the app’s success does follow a familiar pattern for Bytedance, which has demonstrated a startling ability to launch, grow, and sustain services that have users hooked. You could be forgiven for not having heard the name Bytedance before the recent news.
- In 2020, TikTok was among hundreds of Chinese apps barred in India after deadly clashes on the country’s border with China.
- “Although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, describing the bill as “bullying”.
- Bytedance, the owner of the wildly popular short-form video app, is now valued at more than $75 billion following a new round of investment.
- Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022.
- TikTok is inescapable right now, and it’s not just teens paying attention — it’s rocked the business world as well.
- Since it launched in 2012, Toutiao has accumulated hundreds of millions of daily active users who are hooked on its personalized blend of articles.
The founder, 35-year-old Zhang Yiming, rarely gives interviews, and the company’s Western-facing media presence is close to nonexistent. Bytedance is the first Chinese internet company with a significant, genuinely engaged following around the world, which means it’s worthy of serious attention. TikTok is inescapable right now, and it’s not just teens paying attention — it’s rocked the business world as well.
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. ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years. 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. 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. 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.
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. Respectively, Toutiao and Douyin account for 20% and 60% of the company’s total advertising revenues.
When asked during a US congressional hearing in March last year if a Chinese official was on the Beijing ByteDance Technology board, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said “I believe so”. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, ByteDance also lists General Atlantic among its investors. ByteDance’s founders have a 20 per cent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. TikTok has said around 60 per cent of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock. AFP, along with more than 100 fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok and Facebook parent Meta to verify videos that potentially contain false information. The Chinese company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world.
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Company officials initially rebuffed these claims but later admitted that their employees had obtained data from American TikTok users, including journalists and those connected to them. According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track an internal mole at the company who was thought to be in contact with reporters. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced that they had begun an investigation in late 2022 into the claim against ByteDance. In 2016 ByteDance released the video-sharing app Douyin, exclusively for users in China. 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.
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. 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. ByteDance products have faced government-led investigations and large-scale bans in other countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey. Hello and TikTok were banned in India, thereby removing millions of users from the apps’ reach.
TikTok later claimed that a “moderation error” caused the ban and offered Aziz an apology. The first product the group produced was the app Neihan Duanzi (“profound gags”), which allowed users to share jokes and memes. This was followed by the news aggregator app Toutiao, which used machine and deep learning algorithms to deliver a personalized news feed to users. Toutiao became an early flagship of ByteDance and continues to have more than 300 million monthly active users. The company also developed the Indian social media app Hello, as well as the popular Indonesian news aggregator Baca Berita (BaBe). ByteDance, Chinese technology company that developed novel video-sharing social networking applications, most notably TikTok.
Launch of first apps
Bytedance, the owner of the wildly popular short-form video app, is now valued at more than $75 billion following a new round of investment. This means Uber has unexpectedly lost its long-held title of the world’s most valuable day trading dax stock futures and dax e tech startup to a low-profile challenger from China. That 1 percent stake also came with a board seat in ByteDance’s Chinese entity, tech news website The Information reported in 2021. “Although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, describing the bill as “bullying”.
Toutiao
In this article, the authors explain the many ways in which ByteDance has used its SSP to fuel development and growth. The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions 7 top tools for responsive web design testing 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.
Despite this reassurance, the U.S. state of Montana passed a law to ban the app in the state. 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. Most of the content is decidedly low-brow and could be called “clickbait” if not for the fact that it keeps people coming back. Since it launched in 2012, Toutiao has accumulated hundreds of millions of daily active users who are hooked on its personalized blend of articles. ByteDance has also been accused of using apps like TikTok to employ intrusive data-gathering techniques. In 2022 Forbes technology reporter Emily Baker-White claimed that she had been spied on and tracked by ByteDance after writing an article critical of TikTok.
ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around US$225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. ByteDance’s founders have a 20 percent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. A privately held firm, ByteDance does not release revenue and profit figures, but media estimates of its earnings put it on par with some of the biggest firms in the world.
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. The Chinese commerce ministry published rules in 2020 that added “civilian use” to a list of technologies that are restricted for export. A large number of US lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China. TikTok has said around 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock. To continue, upgrade to a supported browser or, for the finest experience, download the mobile app. A large number of US lawmakers – Republicans how to identify base and counter currencies and Democrats – are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China.
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. 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. 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.
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