In a few months, ByteDance merged US-based short-video app rival Musical.ly into TikTok. TikTok managed a feat that the Tencent-backed WeChat couldn’t achieve, which was expansion outside China. This would be a milestone not only for ByteDance, but also for Chinese tech. But September 2017 would also mark another massive milestone.ĭouYin was launched as TikTok in the international market. In September 2017, it ran its first advertising campaign with sponsored videos from Airbnb, Harbin Beer and Chevrolet. With growing community engagement, the app started exploring monetization opportunities. DouYin provided titillating news content with videos, GIF and live streaming shows.ĭouYin also perfected its app by including a wider choice of filters, stickers and effects which could be added to the videos to make them more engaging. The addictive delivery of content made it a huge success. While competitors like Kuaishou were asking users to click on videos, DouYin had a more addictive “swipe” interface. Players like Tencent backed Kuaishou, Weibo backed Miaopai and Baidu backed Haokan Shepin were prominent players since 2012.ĭespite that, Douyin, which was developed in 200 days, managed to rack up 100MM users by 2017 with more than 1 Bn videos viewed every day.ĭouYin’s game changing feature was its interface. In 2016, ByteDance launched Douyin in China.ĭouyin was conceptualized as a platform that allowed users to create and watch funny short videos.ĭouyin’s concept wasn’t unique. With such high momentum ByteDance was already competing head to head with other enduring tech giants like Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.īut ByteDance’s crowning glory lay in something more ephemeral. By 2014, Toutiao already had 15MM DAUs, as it plugged this gap.īetween 20 ByteDance forayed into multiple short media mobile apps including Helo (an Indian social media app), Vigo Video (formerly Hypstar), BaBe (an Indonesian news and content app) and Huoshan (a Chinese short-form video app), Flipagram, Xigua Video and Huashan Zhibo. That little app reached a record breaking 100MM users in one year.Ĭhina was leapfrogging to mobile apps, but there was a void in personalised social media offering. This was around the same time when the Chinese giant Tencent launched a little app called WeChat. Toutiao, meaning ‘Today’s Headlines’, was launched in 2012 as ByteDance’s flagship app. After falling flat with the bulk of China’s venture investors, Zhang eventually secured a seed round in 2012. He built an app that had crisp content, was mobile first and underpinned with algorithms which offered a personalized news service.īut like most legendary startups, the world’s most valuable startup today didn’t fly with investors. Not only was their content uninteresting in its presentation and lengthy and cumbersome to read, their websites were suboptimal for mobile browsing.Ī strong believer in providing a superior user-experience, Zhang harboured the simple but powerful idea of a mobile app which made reading news compelling. He realised that the sole source of news for his countrymen was the state-controlled, highly-regulated media houses. Zhang began understanding human needs in short attention spans. During his stint at, Zhang had begun fostering a deep understanding of something that would become core to his future endeavours. Zhang had an innate sense of identifying latent unmet consumer needs. It would also result in a double edged “do first, apologize later” mentality. The ethos of rapid experimentation till something compelling was found would become key to Zhang’s outlook. Zhang, almost ephemerally, left yet again to find something bigger. In search of a better career opportunity he joined Microsoft in 2008, but left soon feeling that his creativity was being stifled there.ĭuring the next few years Zhang went on to establish multiple start-ups, one among which was, a real estate search portal which was showing some promise. However, Zhang didn’t stay at Kuxum for long. Post his undergrad, Zhang joined a travel website, Kuxun and rapidly rose to be a Technical Director within a year. Zhang Yiming was a young software engineer, graduating from Tianjin’s Nankai University in 2005. Last fortnight, TikTok stepped into a maelstrom of a ratings collapse, being ripped off by a clone and getting uninstalled for being a “Chinese” product.
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