They are curious and looking for new apps and social media, and also very willing to spread ideas word of mouth, so you don’t have to spend a lot on marketing — they will come to you if you can make your app compelling to this group of users. At a Senate hearing in September, TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas said the forthcoming CFIUS contract would “satisfy all national security concerns” about the app. ByteDance owned around a fifth (paywall) of the news aggregator as of March last year, after it led a $25 million funding round in the app in 2016. Based in Bengaluru, the app is sort of an Indian version of Toutiao, also offering curated content using machine learning technologies to its users in 14 Indian languages. With over 188 million daily active users, the app is one of the biggest news aggregators in India.
- Each user is measured across millions of dimensions, and its extensive personalization has made it one of the most popular content discovery platforms in China.
- And even when I used TikTok daily a while back, I didn’t follow a single person.
- So, let’s go deeper into the current stage of ByteDance, Act III, specifically around their most successful product, TikTok.
- Employees receive gifts and awards for exhibiting ByteStyles, and staffers have promoted its principles in posts on platforms like LinkedIn since at least 2017.
ByteDance has long been celebrated as an “app factory” for its proven model of churning out apps and monetizing them through a robust back end of shared resources, from engineering to marketing support. The result is a rank of household apps — Douyin and Toutiao in China and TikTok in the rest of the world. Liang said the top priorities for ByteDance this year would be to “enhance the [company’s] sense of crisis”, “continue to increase corporate social responsibility” and “focus on a few key businesses”. In the US, tech companies have been touting their workplace philosophies for decades. A US trading firm reportedly owns 15% of TikTok-owner ByteDance, a stake potentially worth more than $15 billion.
Available in 14 Indian languages including Hindi and Marathi, the India-based app offers users a wide range of short videos, jokes, and entertainment news. To better compete with ShareChat, Helo is reportedly introducing English content and aims to double its 50 million monthly active users by the end of last year. Douyin, which means “shaking sound,” was one of ByteDance’s first forays into short-form video. It was initially launched in 2016 as a lip-syncing app, but soon saw users posting videos of their daily lives or of memes. Similar to the success of its international version TikTok, Douyin has had a good run in China.
Sustainable word-of-mouth growth is probably the gold standard when it comes to a growth engine for your business. How far and wide you go are then all added to your data profile, helping the algorithm curate your feed even further to your known (and unknown) interests. A variable reward—for the non-psych folks like myself—is a gratification token used in the Hook Model, delivered intermittently, meant to keep users repeating the same action in the hope of another reward. It’s a reward system powerful for driving attention, focus, and repeated action. Selection is a selling feature for new users, but it can quickly become an unintended bug for retained users that face a constantly growing surplus of options. Build a network for TikTok as fast as possible and win in each market, simply, by crushing other SFV competitors by outspending them.
Going back to my onboarding journey, instead of figuring out who I should follow and add to my “network”, I was just served a bunch of content. Which soon, becomes hyper-personalized to me based on thousands of objects and tags analyzed in each individual video, along with my view history, re-watches, watch time, likes, comments, shares, etc. Oracle spokesperson Ken Glueck said that while TikTok does currently use Oracle’s cloud services, “we have absolutely no insight one way or the other” into who can access TikTok user data. “Today, TikTok is running in the Oracle cloud, but just like Bank of America, General Motors, and a million other customers, they have full control of everything they’re doing,” he said.
In the furiously competitive world of tech startups, where good entrepreneurs tend to think of comparable ideas around the same time and “hot spaces” get crowded quickly with well-funded hopefuls, competitive moats matter more than ever. But one of TikTok’s most valuable hooks is that anyone does actually stand a shot at being seen. This means there’s a greater window of opportunity for people with compelling content to get popular, fast.
The Endgame: The “RESTRICT Act”, banning TikTok for Americans, and the future of the Internet
However with over 220 million users, Zhihu has maintained its status over Wukong as the largest Chinese Q&A forum. The banning of an app removes an opportunity for communication and expression for millions of American users. [And] TikTok bans dramatically expand the government’s ability to control what apps and technologies Americans can choose to use to communicate. Further, https://bigbostrade.com/ bans create consequences not just for the companies themselves, but also for users who violate the bans. Many products follow the “remote control” model by not taking an opinionated view of what users experience. I recently signed up for Twitter and Reddit and while there’s a wealth of interesting content on both platforms, it’s on me to dial into the right channels.
The “RESTRICT Act”, and what it means for Internet privacy
In the meantime, the firm has prided itself on its “flat” internal organization with a flurry of self-governing products. As of September 2020, Zhang had 14 executives reporting to him, according to data compiled by The Information. And while ByteStyles are central to TikTok’s culture, their open-ended nature can make them frustrating when applied to specific work situations, according to four current and former staffers at the company. These TikTok insiders felt ByteStyles were sometimes used as catch-all warnings to employees about behavior that the company didn’t like.
The Chinese “app factory” behind the global rise of TikTok
I imagine one of the biggest hurdles in getting someone to post their first video, is simply addressing the question, “What should I make? And then lots of people came to your country, and you grow the population, you grow the economy. Together, these forces have made TikTok the best destination for millions of creators around the world to come and build an audience. Which, as we’ll get to in a minute, drives an essential flywheel.
One of the key problems in advertising is identifying how to selectively place your ads in front of the highest potential customers, and advertisers spend countless hours and enormous sums of money trying to target effectively. Toutiao’s technology, which solves this targeting problem natively, represented a solution and saves advertisers from paying a big premium for it. Push relevant content to people by generating high-quality recommendations through artificial intelligence. So, wherever your feelings about TikTok lie, I hope you’ll stick with me as we unpack not just the mobile slot machine that is TikTok, but also ByteDance — the most valuable private tech company on the planet. TikTok did not respond to questions about whether it has ever served different content or experiences to government officials, regulators, activists or journalists than the general public in the TikTok app.
Users can buy virtual currency which they then gift to content creators. In fact, ByteDance is embroiled in a bitter rivalry with Tencent in particular. Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have made public jabs at each other, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against each other. In November 2020, Bytedance accused Tencent of blocking TikTok videos on its platforms, including the dominant messaging which best describes the difference between preferred and common stocks app WeChat; Tencent responded by suing ByteDance for libel and anti-competitive practices. Basically, if the US has beef with another country, they can ban any apps that come into the US from them. Transparency into the process behind these bans is outside of any Freedom of Information Act request, and it allows the monitoring of anyone in the US using the Internet no matter how they access it.
ByteDance reorganization offers glimpse into TikTok parent’s future
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. In fact, China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires Chinese companies to furnish any customer information relevant to China’s national security.
Compared with Douyin and TikTok users, who mostly create videos ranging from 15 to 60 seconds, Xigua gives users the opportunity to tell a longer story, with videos lasting around three to five minutes. Now with over 131 million monthly active users (link in Chinese), the app is deemed by some a mini version of Netflix, as its major attraction is content such as variety shows and TV series or films purchased from third parties. The app was ranked the fourth most downloaded free app on the China iOS store on Feb. 17, ahead of Douyin, which was ranked 13th, according to App Annie. 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.
Internally, staffers use ByteStyles as a way to call out what the company deems good or bad performance during employee evaluations, and some employees are rewarded for exhibiting ByteStyle values. They can also be used in a disciplinary context, as was the case when the TikTok employee was told to adjust their tone after a town hall call. The email exchange was later posted on Lark, the company’s internal messaging service, and shared with Insider by another employee. 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.