The Story of TikTok and China's ByteDance
Witness the rise of a social media giant.
Consider a basement in China filled with thousands of smartphones, each linked to a central PC. This unsettling setting is the core of a "click farm," an underground enterprise that exploits the algorithms of social media apps such as TikTok. Click farms assist marketers in artificially inflating metrics and increasing the visibility of their videos by replicating human action on such devices. So, how did we get here? How did we end up in a world overloaded with short-form video content, where our simulated or natural attention is valuable?
In this brief, we'll look at the spectacular rise of ByteDance, the firm behind the social media phenomenon TikTok. Today, ByteDance is a massive corporation with a diversified range of products and services, including gaming, education, enterprise productivity, and payments. However, the company's early adoption of machine learning technology paved the way for TikTok's global supremacy.
Ready to learn how ByteDance remained ahead of the competition in a rapidly evolving digital landscape? Let's dive in.
1. Seeds of ambition.
In a small village in southeast China, a young boy named Zhang Yiming spent his infancy consuming books, cultivating a voracious desire for information that distinguished him from his friends. His parents held great expectations for him and encouraged his educational endeavors. In reality, his name, "Yiming," refers to a Chinese phrase that literally translates to "a single cry that startles the world" - referring to someone from low beginnings who suddenly rises to tremendous success.
Yiming's journey to success was paved with unusual decisions and a focused focus on his objectives. When choosing a university, he put his interests ahead of prestige, selecting an institution based on variables such as accessibility to the beach and the ability to experience snow. In college, he studied programming, fixed computers for classmates, and met his future wife.
Shortly after graduation, Yiming joined Kuxun, a tourism industry company, where he first encountered the ferocity of China's internet business. It was a world where speed and adaptability were essential, and young grads were eager to work themselves to the bone for a shot at success. Yiming flourished there and swiftly rose through the ranks.
He eventually worked for Microsoft and Fanfou, a Twitter clone, where he honed his knowledge of the online world. Fanfou's quick collapse owing to government censorship is a sharp reminder of the hazards that Chinese media enterprises confront.
He then went on to 99Fang, a real estate search service that demonstrated mobile apps' ability to aggregate information from thousands of sources into a single, effortless feed. He saw how technology might be used to surface the most relevant material for users, and he was determined to be at the forefront of this shift.
Yiming saw the mobile internet revolution as a once-in-a-lifetime chance, so he bravely decided to leave 99Fang and pursue something more significant. He aspired to establish a corporation that could affect the lives of everyone, not just those in a single industry. Yiming could not have imagined the global significance of ByteDance when he was about to launch it.
2. ByteDance's initial steps
It was the early days of ByteDance, and Yiming had recently received a $80,000 angel investment. With this seed money and a strong desire to capitalize on the prospects of the mobile internet wave, he and his team set up shop in a modest four-bedroom apartment.
ByteDance began a voyage of quick exploration. During the first half of 2012, the team released over a dozen apps, testing various themes and directions. Their early works, with names like "Hilarious Goofy Pics" and "Implied Jokes," aimed at light entertainment and soon gained millions of users.
However, ByteDance struggled to attract top talent due to the lowbrow quality of these programs. Engineers and executives were afraid to link themselves with information deemed frivolous or rude.
On the other hand, while seemingly simple, these apps were highly advanced. ByteDance's brilliant mobile developers excelled at creating continuous content updates and efficient backend technologies, resulting in lightweight, user-friendly apps that stood out in the market.
Yiming became preoccupied with data mining and information recommendation, which led him to a critical realization: the mobile age needs a new approach to content consumption. He identified three major customer pain points: cellphones' narrow screens, fractured time, and information overload, and set out to create a flagship product that addressed these issues squarely. Thus, the app Jinri Toutiao, or "Today's Headlines," was created.
Toutiao intended to aggregate and organize internet content using big data and machine intelligence. Yiming envisioned a future in which human editors would be supplanted by automated systems capable of efficiently matching content to users' tastes.
Although the app initially struggled to raise investment, Yiming eventually secured the support he required to bring the company through a Series B capital round. With this funding, ByteDance moved into formal office space and worked to improve its primary product. Toutiao's user base expanded, and so did ByteDance's goals.
Yiming believed in the value of content discovery and recommendation. He recognized the limitations of subscription-based models such as RSS feeds, claiming they were overly demanding of consumers and failed to accommodate the bite-sized, fragmented nature of mobile material consumption. Instead, he believed that algorithms could anticipate user preferences and present relevant content at the appropriate time, eliminating the need for active curation on the user's behalf.
ByteDance's approach to suggestion starkly contrasted the techniques used by the other leading competitors in the Chinese internet environment. While giants like Baidu dominated search and WeChat dominated the super-app area, more startups that correctly grasped the possibilities of recommendation engines needed to be created.
This provided an excellent chance for ByteDance to carve out a niche and redefine how people consumed information on mobile devices. By leveraging the power of machine learning and a thorough understanding of user behavior, ByteDance established a new paradigm for content distribution, forever altering how people discovered and engaged with information in the digital age.
3. Developing user communities.
Hundreds of well-dressed young people congregated in the center of Beijing at a fashionable converted factory. Zhang Yiming, dressed casually in a black baseball cap and gray T-shirt, stood out among influencers and content creators. They were there to commemorate the first anniversary of Douyin, a short video app that had taken China by storm and served as the forerunner to TikTok.
Douyin's climb to fame was not an overnight triumph but the product of ByteDance's meticulous and patient strategy. The company entered the Chinese short-video market somewhat late, trailing established players such as Kuaishou and Meipai. Undeterred, ByteDance started a three-pronged attack, developing three apps: one to mimic YouTube, one to compete with the popular video app Kuaishou, and one to compete with Musical.ly, an app that allowed users to create and share lip-sync videos. The last one was A.me, eventually renamed Douyin.
Kelly Zhang, a ByteDance veteran known for her ability to develop online communities, took on the duty of overseeing the app. Zhang and her tiny team operated within ByteDance like a startup.
ByteDance's executive team was initially skeptical of A.me's potential, citing Musical.ly's failure to acquire traction in China. Determined to succeed, Zhang and her team treated their tiny group of devoted producers like royalty, cultivating a feeling of community and encouraging user-generated content through challenges and prizes. They hunted for talent in art institutions nationwide, promising students a chance at online fame and attracting a wave of young creatives to help launch the site.
As Douyin's user base developed, ByteDance began to deploy its sophisticated recommendation engine, honed over years of experience with Toutiao. The algorithm's ability to surface high-quality content from unknown producers was game-changing. Ordinary people now had the chance to go viral and become overnight sensations, which kept users interested and driven to create.
Douyin's positioning shifted as its popularity grew. Initially aimed at feminine preteens and young adults, the app reinvented itself as a platform for stylish urban youth before taking a more neutral approach with the phrase "Record beautiful life." This transition enabled Douyin to reach a larger audience and broaden its programming, expanding beyond music and dance to cover a broad spectrum of interests.
ByteDance invested significantly in Douyin, including millions spent on advertising campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and user acquisition. And it worked: the app shot to the top of the download charts. By early 2018, Douyin had become a cultural phenomenon, and its name had become commonplace in China. ByteDance has evolved from a modest app clone into a cultural juggernaut that reshaped China's short video environment.
4. ByteDance goes worldwide.
Inside a tiny, cramped office hidden among the bustling streets of Tokyo's Shibuya area, Chinese employees worked feverishly to launch a new software in Japan. This was the humble start of TikTok's global development, which would see the short video platform conquer the world one country at a time.
ByteDance has always had global ambitions. As China's short video industry grew increasingly crowded, ByteDance focused on foreign expansion. As a result, Douyin developed a new brand geared to the worldwide stage: TikTok.
ByteDance's approach to internationalization was straightforward but effective: globalize products and localize content. TikTok's essential elements, including its branding, user experience, and underlying technology, were the same throughout all markets. However, the material pool and promotional techniques were adjusted to each location, ensuring that consumers in Japan were not shown films from Indonesia and vice versa. This personalized approach enabled TikTok to build an engaging experience that appealed to users from various cultures and languages.
As TikTok gained a foothold in Japan and other Asian markets, ByteDance found itself in a position to acquire Musical.ly, an early competitor. The American app needed help to monetize its user base and compete against larger platforms such as Instagram and YouTube. ByteDance's $800 million acquisition of Musical.ly in 2017 gave the firm a sizeable Western user base and prohibited potential rivals from utilizing the app to fight with TikTok.
ByteDance was eager to see if its complex technology, which included video analysis, augmented reality filters, and a unique recommendation engine, could be applied in other areas. Indeed, TikTok captivated consumers worldwide, succeeding where no other Chinese-made consumer internet product had before. The tables had turned, and it was now up to Silicon Valley to catch up and "copy from China."
Perhaps the most significant modification was incorporating Douyin's backend technology, which replaced Musical.ly's "Featured" feed with the highly tailored "For You" feed. This move, enabled by ByteDance's superior recommendation engine, unleashed the app's full potential, increasing user engagement.
TikTok's spectacular rise continued in the West, where its true power emerged through music-driven, user-generated video memes. These memes, divided into reveal, dance, challenge, filter, and concept genres, significantly reduced the barriers to content generation and participation. The phenomenon of "Old Town Road," a record-breaking song that rose to prominence thanks to a viral TikTok meme, demonstrated the platform's power to launch obscure musicians to global popularity.
As TikTok's cultural clout expanded, Facebook scrambled to retaliate. CEO Mark Zuckerberg's initial intention to challenge the program with a clone dubbed Lasso did not take off, and subsequent attempts, such as Instagram Reels, were met with minimal success.
TikTok's moat, it turned out, was its advanced technology and the affluent community of professional content creators it had built. It created an atmosphere that transformed users into creators, assisted creators in finding their audience, and gave profit opportunities. TikTok created a self-reinforcing loop that competitors still struggle to imitate.
TikTok's success results from creativity and adaptation to the particular demands of the mobile era. As the app continues to break download records and win the hearts and minds of people worldwide, ByteDance's aim of creating a genuinely global sensation has finally come true.
Final Summary
ByteDance used machine learning and an understanding of user behavior to transform how we interact with our mobile devices.
The company's success stems from its ability to create a seamless, tailored user experience that addresses the fragmented nature of mobile content consumption. By combining intelligent algorithms, specialized content tactics, and fostering lively, creative communities, ByteDance has transformed the social media landscape and challenged Silicon Valley's supremacy.
TikTok, its invention, continues to captivate audiences worldwide, serving as a compelling reminder of the potential for innovation to disrupt the status quo and push the frontiers of what is possible in the digital domain.