Nearly half of those are for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, while its other apps divvy up the remaining users in China and overseas with offerings that range from more video streaming apps to news content and industry-specific platforms. Roughly translating as “Watermelon Video,” the launched app is positioned as a platform for “professional user generated content,” or higher quality content than other user generated apps. 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.
He complained that Tencent’s new games did not perform as well as expected, reports Reuters. While Tencent’s staple hits like Honor of Kings and PUBG Mobile continue to deliver strong revenue, the company’s newer games are losing to those from other Chinese developers like NetEase and miHoYo, developer of Genshin Impact. ByteDance is not the first tech giant to have considered using an app to monitor specific U.S. users. naga broker In 2017, the New York Times reported that Uber had identified various local politicians and regulators and served them a separate, misleading version of the Uber app to avoid regulatory penalties. At the time, Uber acknowledged that it had run the program, called “greyball,” but said it was used to deny ride requests to “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers,” among other groups.
- There are several types of TikTok ads, including In-Feed ads, Brand Takeovers, and Branded Hashtag Challenges.
- Bytedance’s advertising business model is taking market share from other tech giants such as Baidu and Tencent in China as well as Facebook overseas.
- To grab users from its strongest rival, Chinese Q&A app Zhihu, the app reportedly lured some influencers who rose to fame with their answers on Zhihu, paying a high price for their content.
- In respond to that, Bytedance started to employ a large team of editors to filter and censor content to comply with authorities.
- And in spite of the heightened political pressure in the U.S., she said the team-up offers clear benefits for both sides.
ByteDance is reportedly exploring a whole host of new areas that could unlock new monetization potential. A spokesperson for ByteDance declined to comment on the financial figures when contacted by CNBC. Liang is the second Chinese tech CEO to complain about employees this week. ByteDance acquired Baikemy for 500 million yuan (US$70 million) in 2020, according to Chinese media outlet Yicai, when demand for medical care was soaring amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The Coze website is operated by Beijing Chuntian Zhiyun Technology Co, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Beijing Douyin Information Service Co, one of ByteDance’s major entities in China.
Advertising business
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. But the material reviewed by Forbes indicates that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team was planning to use this location information to surveil individual American citizens, not to target ads or any of these other purposes. Forbes is not disclosing the nature and purpose of the planned surveillance referenced in the materials in order to protect sources. TikTok and ByteDance did not answer questions about whether Internal Audit has specifically targeted any members of the U.S. government, activists, public figures or journalists.
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. Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022.
Markets
Similar to the success of its international version TikTok, Douyin has had a good run in China. The app says it had over 400 million daily active users as of January, helping it make up nearly 70% of China’s mobile social network users, according to marketing research firm eMarketer. Douyin and TikTok are two separate entities, although some metrics firms club their numbers.
Lark (Feishu)
ByteDance has launched a platform similar to OpenAI’s GPTs, which allows users to customise its ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) bot for specific tasks, as the Chinese owner of TikTok accelerates its AI drive. The researchers said in a new paper that StreamVoice can do “real-time conversion” of a user’s voice to any other, so long as the user has just “one utterance” of speech from the voice they want to imitate. The output occurs at the speed of livestreaming, with just 124 milliseconds of latency, the paper, which noted that AI voice-conversion technology thus far has mostly only been effective “offline,” said. The researchers noted that “recent language-model advancements” allowed them to create this tool.
Northwestern Polytechnical University is not affiliated with Northwestern University in the US. 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. A China-based team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes.
TikTok: re-defining social media with user engagement
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. In 2012, Zhang Yiming, a locally trained engineer and serial entrepreneur started Toutiao, a news aggregator app that scrape news from the internet and push to people “based on their interests”. When explaining the business, Zhang Yiming told investors that Toutiao’s recommendation algorithm was powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. The CEO emphasized that Toutiao was not a news company, but an AI company in the search business or social media business.
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 https://traderoom.info/ (BaBe). 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.
TikTok’s Parent ByteDance Pushes Into Payments With Help From J.P. Morgan
In addition, the consumer-centric nature of Bytedance’s business means it ultimately competes for user spare time, which is limited. Management currently address these issues by creating innovative and differentiated product features. Going abroad to under-penetrated markets was also another strategy that the management is currently adopting. The success of Toutiao has pitted ByteDance into a pitched battle with social media and gaming giant Tencent, parent of the WeChat messaging app, another popular source of news from both publications and self-published authors.
The company has more than 150,000 employees and operates offices worldwide. Liu’s warning followed a similar message from Jack Ma, founder of fellow e-commerce firm Alibaba. Ma took to Alibaba’s internal forum in November calling for “change and reform” to the company, and praising newcomer PDD Holdings. ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo was just the latest to fret about being left behind according to excerpts from his speech posted on the company’s WeChat account. Liang complained that employees were “not sensitive enough to external changes” and griped that staff only started talking about ChatGPT, the buzzy chatbot developed by OpenAI that sparked the AI boom, in 2023. Liu’s warning followed a similar message from Jack Ma, founder of fellow e-commerce firm Alibaba.
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. 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. 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.
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. To grab users from its strongest rival, Chinese Q&A app Zhihu, the app reportedly lured some influencers who rose to fame with their answers on Zhihu, paying a high price for their content. However with over 220 million users, Zhihu has maintained its status over Wukong as the largest Chinese Q&A forum. 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.
