The app has been downloaded nearly 80 million times in the US, with even the likes of Jimmy Fallon giving it high-profile endorsements. TikTok is banned from government employees’ work phones in the United States and several other nations including Australia and Canada over security concerns. Of course, TikTok’s devoted and rapidly growing audience wouldn’t say that the appeal of the app has anything to do with AI. But the app’s success does follow a familiar pattern for Bytedance, which has demonstrated a startling ability to launch, grow, and sustain services that have users hooked. You could be forgiven for not having heard the name Bytedance before the recent news.
- 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.
- Hello and TikTok were banned in India, thereby removing millions of users from the apps’ reach.
- The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions of users.
- It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data.
- This means Uber has unexpectedly lost its long-held title of the world’s most valuable tech startup to a low-profile challenger from China.
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 https://www.day-trading.info/stocks-triple-bottom-triple-bottom-pattern-triple/ accumulated hundreds of millions of daily active users who are hooked on its personalized blend of articles. 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.
A privately held company, 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. The company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world. / Sign up for Verge Deals to get united world capital limited deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox daily. We believe at ByteDance that high ethical standards and a culture of integrity play a pivotal role throughout the development of the company. Therefore, we have developed the ByteDance Code of Conduct and ByteDance Partner Code of Conduct.
In addition, in November 2022 the European Union (EU) confirmed the existence of an ongoing investigation into TikTok’s data practices, including data transmissions to China. 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.
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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.
Driven by the success of TikTok and their other apps, ByteDance’s yearly revenue ballooned to $80 billion in 2022. The company says it now routes all of its US traffic through infrastructure in the United States, and that it is deleting previously https://www.topforexnews.org/software-development/microsoft-network-engineer-diploma-program-summary/ collected data. It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data. That 1 percent stake also came with a board seat in ByteDance’s Chinese entity, tech news website The Information reported in 2021.
According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track 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. House Committee on Energy and Commerce to address accusations that the app is a threat to American national security. Chew downplayed any connection to or favouritism toward China’s government and elaborated on the steps the company planned to take to better protect the data of American users.
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). 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. Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have jabbed at each other in public, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against one another.
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During the past decade, ByteDance has proven itself time and again to be a spectacularly innovative and successful company. This has been true not only for TikTok but many of its other apps, which have vast numbers of users. In this article, the authors explain the many ways in which ByteDance has used its SSP to fuel development and growth. Tencent is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia, but Bytedance has beaten it to the punch with TikTok, allowing it to claim a degree of greater influence on the wider social networks of the world.
ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years. “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”. 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. These concerns have been echoed by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies — including by the FBI director this week — as well as regulators elsewhere. 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.
TikTok has said around 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock. 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. 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.
Launch of first apps
It’s the first Chinese company to tap into the lucrative social media appetite of Westerners, and that could prove to be very valuable indeed. The company’s most notable achievement is in gaining its level of success without being propped up by any of the country’s internet mega-giants like Tencent, Alibaba, or Baidu. Alibaba was turned down this year after expressing interest in an investment or acquisition, according to Reuters, while Tencent is said to have divested itself of a small stake in Bytedance some time ago. TikTok is inescapable right now, and it’s not just teens paying attention — it’s rocked the business world as well. Bytedance, the owner of the wildly popular short-form video app, is now valued at more than $75 billion following a new round of investment. This means Uber has unexpectedly lost its long-held title of the world’s most valuable tech startup to a low-profile challenger from China.
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 first product the group produced was the app Neihan Duanzi (“profound gags”), which allowed users to share jokes and memes. This was followed by the news aggregator app Toutiao, which used machine and deep learning algorithms to deliver a personalized news feed to users. Toutiao became an early flagship of ByteDance and continues to have more than 300 million monthly active users. The company also developed the Indian social media app Hello, as well as the popular Indonesian news aggregator Baca Berita (BaBe).
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. In 2020 ByteDance released CapCut, a video-editing software with more than 200 million monthly active users. ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people’s lives. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok.
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. Respectively, Toutiao and Douyin account for 20% and 60% of the company’s total advertising revenues.