(2022-08-23) Chin Tiktok One Very Long Year

Cedric Chin TikTok case - One Very Long Year. It’s clear that TikTok has captured global attention. As of press time in 2022, they have about 1.6 billion monthly active users.

In 2021, its users racked up an estimated 22.6 trillion minutes on the platform — about 43 million years. This was more than double Netflix’s

with hindsight, it seems obvious that a short-video app would have succeeded the way it did

But that story of progression is far from what actually happened.

In March 2012, when Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo started ByteDance in their first office — located in a Beijing apartment — they didn’t start with the idea of a short video app. Instead, Yiming only knew that he wanted to do something to ride the new mobile internet wave

Yiming and Rubo started out by launching a variety of entertainment apps.

In August 2012, ByteDance decided to launch a new flagship product, something a little more cultured — Toutiao, a news and information app. The goal was to have algorithms recommend content based on past user behaviour

At the time however, Toutiao’s recommendation system was basic

He poached Baidu’s staff like their Deputy Director of Search, Yang Zhenyuan, in 2014 and continued to hire other recommendation-system talent for the next few years.

ByteDance entered the nascent short-video app market in 2016 by copying from the best. They would launch three apps. “Xigua Video” imitated YouTube. “Huoshan Short Video” imitated Kuaishou, China’s leading short-video app. And “A.me” imitated Musical.ly, the Western market leader of short videos. Of the three, ByteDance had the least confidence in A.me.

By 2015, when the ByteDance team started to discuss their future direction at a company retreat, Yiming brought up the idea of trying short videos. The idea wasn’t new

The initial data gathering also looked unpromising for A.me.

When A.me was launched in September 2016, there was no explosive growth or media fanfare

Yiming reasoned as such: “The logically correct thing is definitely right. And others have already verified (this path), our data is poor because we haven’t done a good job ourselves.

ByteDance then went on a spending spree. It advertised the refreshed Douyin with playful advertisements in cinemas and online — ads that quickly went viral.

October. In 2017, over the course of that one critical month, Douyin’s daily users doubled from seven to 14 million. By the end of the year, they had reached 30 million daily users. At the same time, the 30-day retention rate improved from eight percent to over 20 percent, and in-app time doubled from 20 minutes to 40 minutes. These improvements were largely attributed to Zhu Wenjia, a leading algorithm specialist from Baidu

In 2018, Douyin had a daily promotion budget of US$2.8 million

In 2018, ByteDance deliberately changed their promotion strategy once again to invite a wider group of users

By the end of 2018, Douyin had more than 200 million daily active users.