How ByteDance Became the Worlds Most Valuable Startup

what is bytedance

In June of 2020, the popular video-sharing app launched TikTok for Business as a way for brands to run their own ads within the app. There are several types of TikTok ads, including In-Feed ads, Brand Takeovers, and Branded Hashtag Challenges. 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. Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing apps TikTok and Douyin. Tencent is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia, but Bytedance has beaten it to the punch with TikTok, allowing how to become a mobile app developer it to claim a degree of greater influence on the wider social networks of the world. TikTok is inescapable right now, and it’s not just teens paying attention — it’s rocked the business world as well.

ByteDance has overtaken Baidu to become the second-largest performer in China. ByteDance took 23% of all digital media to spend in the first half of the year 2019, which is equivalent to $7 billion. 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. 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. 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.

what is bytedance

Douyin

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. 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.

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what is bytedance

A Chinese state-owned entity owns 1 percent of Douyin, according to the ByteDance website. TikTok has said this is a requirement under Chinese law and does not impact ByteDance’s international operations. ByteDance’s founders have a 20 percent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. 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.

Censorship, surveillance, and data privacy concerns

ByteDance is a global tech company which is headquartered at Beijing, China. The company is operating on a range of platforms allowing people to connect across languages, cultures and geographies to create, discover and connect. The company has a portfolio of applications available in over 150 markets and 75 languages, which includes TikTok, Helo, Douyin, Resso, Lark, Toutiao, and BaBe. 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.

In 2008, Yiming joined Microsoft, however found it tough to cope up with the company rules of Microsoft which made him leave Microsoft to join Fanfou (Twitter clone in China). In 2009, Fanfou was shut down owing to certain controversies, and that very year, quote currency financial definition of quote currency 2020 Yiming started his very first startup 99fang.com, which is a real estate search portal. Meanwhile, smartphones began to take over and more and more people started using smartphones, and Yiming could very well see the opportunity underlying it, which made him leave 99fang.com to start ByteDance in 2012.

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. TikTok uses advanced algorithmic methods to predict which videos users will enjoy and thus create a personalized assortment of videos for them to peruse on their “For You” page (FYP).

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. And Bytedance’s news services inevitably risk running into the same algorithmic pitfalls that have plagued Facebook for years; the company’s apps have been accused of spreading fake news in countries such as India and beyond. 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. Much of TikTok’s popularity came from viral videos that were shared by Internet influencers and social media stars who had millions of followers. TikTok’s popularity also increased considerably during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of housebound social media users turned to their phones for entertainment.

The company says it now routes all of its US traffic through infrastructure in the United States, and that it is deleting previously collected data. It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data. TikTok’s CEO has told Congress that the firm has never been asked by the Chinese government for US user data nor has it provided it. TikTok is banned from government employees’ work phones in the United States and several other nations including Australia and Canada over security concerns.

How ByteDance Became the World’s Most Valuable Startup

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. 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 Supermarket stocks 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. Bytedance is, in fact, locked in a fierce rivalry with Tencent, in particular.

  1. 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.
  2. The app has been downloaded nearly 80 million times in the US, with even the likes of Jimmy Fallon giving it high-profile endorsements.
  3. Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing apps TikTok and Douyin.
  4. ByteDance is a global tech company which is headquartered at Beijing, China.

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.

“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”. 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. That 1 percent stake also came with a board seat in ByteDance’s Chinese entity, tech news website The Information reported in 2021. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. In the year 2006, Yimimg became the fifth employee and first engineer at the travel website Kuxun.

In this article, the authors explain the many ways in which ByteDance has used its SSP to fuel development and growth. Increased regulatory barriers were also introduced against the company because of tensions between the United States and China. National security concerns about the collection of user data led the U.S. government to ban the app from being installed on government-issued devices. Legislation was also introduced that could lead to a national ban of the platform altogether. Despite the company’s grandiose success, ByteDance has faced international scrutiny as a result of accusations that the company imposes censorship in favour of the Chinese government. For example, users have accused the company of deleting articles on BaBe that were critical of the Chinese government.

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