A year ago our writer noted that TikTok was the first non-Facebook app to cross 3 billion downloads worldwide: '[Bytedance wants to become as irreplaceable to internet users in the future as Facebook has become now.' It's getting closer. (From 2021)
The way ByteDance does that could be by following in the footsteps of Facebook. After establishing a key base through its core app in the early 2000s, the tech giant, now called Meta, expanded its ecosystem through acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as by becoming a single sign-in source for other services. It insinuated itself into all aspects of users' lives online.
ByteDance has already managed to grow this way in China to a certain extent, says Arnold Ma, CEO of Qumin, a China-focused digital marketing agency. “There’s basically a fully integrated content journey for users, whether they’re just looking to discover content or seeking information in an encyclopedic way,” he says. “Them splitting out a little more is creating a more diverse and segmented business model.
“Being global has always been their ambition,” says Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, a community of investors and operators in Chinese tech. “A lot of entrepreneurs in China of [Zhang] Yiming’s generation made it their mission to build a global company.” And by global, Chinese entrepreneurs usually mean more than 50 percent of their revenue comes from outside China.
If you look carefully, you can already see the seeds of a plan to build on TikTok’s success outside China and develop a broader business around ByteDance and its core product. Despite appearances, that’s not actually TikTok or Douyin, but the algorithmic engine that powers all of its apps. “Because of the nature of the company—that is, it’s an AI company at the core—they can do so much,” says Ouwehand.
When ByteDance first launched TikTok outside China, it sought to try and build a base for the app in southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Japan, and Thailand. The company then moved on to developing countries including India, where TikTok gained more than 200 million monthly active users before it was banned in June 2020 by the Indian government as part of a geopolitical dispute, and Indonesia, where TikTok had 44 million users by mid-2020, according to internal data.