How TikTok’s Owner Became The World’s Most Valuable Unicorn cbinsights.com/research/report/bytedance-tiktok-unicorn ByteDance, the China-based unicorn behind the video-sharing app TikTok, was recently valued at up to $140B. Now, the company is leveraging its recommendation algorithms to expand its portfolio in a bid to join the ranks of Big Tech. Get the full report At the end of 2018, Chinese tech startup ByteDance completed a $3B investment round led by SoftBank at a valuation of about $75B — catapulting it to be the most valuable startup in the world. In 2020, investments made in the company reportedly valued it at up to $140B, cementing its high-flying status. Those who are unfamiliar with the name ByteDance have most likely heard of its flagship product, TikTok. As of May 2020, the viral video app has been downloaded approximately 2B times. The onset of the global coronavirus pandemic and the associated lockdowns have further accelerated TikTok’s trajectory. In Q1’20 alone, TikTok accumulated 315M new downloads worldwide — a record-breaking quarter for an individual app, according to Sensor Tower. As of spring 2020, ByteDance operates more than 20 apps in spaces ranging from news and video to music and mobile gaming. Some, like TikTok, are international in scope. Others, like the news aggregator product Toutiao, have so far only been made available in China. With each new product it launches, ByteDance leverages the same 3 key advantages it has cultivated in its core business areas like news curation and short-form video: A young and highly engaged user base. Like Facebook before it, ByteDance is leveraging an audience of actively engaged young people to facilitate its growth. In the US, 60% of TikTok users reportedly fall between the ages of 16 and 24. Worldwide, two-thirds are under the age of 30. Products engineered for virality. With TikTok, ByteDance appears to have tapped into something powerful in the way that users currently want to engage with content. The top 50 content creators on TikTok have more followers than the populations of Mexico, Canada, the UK, and Australia combined. 1/17 Personalization and recommendation algorithms. One way to think of ByteDance is not so much as a creator of content platforms, but as an artificial intelligence laboratory that specializes in developing algorithms that can match users with content, from video and music to news and e-commerce. Get the full report here ByteDance is jockeying for a spot alongside global tech leaders like Google, Facebook, Amazon, as well as their China-based counterparts Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba. But a permanent place in Big Tech is far from guaranteed. Concerns about ByteDance’s approach to user privacy are mounting and established tech companies and startups alike are singling ByteDance out as a threat, launching products to compete with it directly. ByteDance will have to prove its viral products are more than a craze. In this report, we look at ByteDance’s expanding product portfolio, highlighting how its core advantages play out in each product. We’ll also examine how the company is expanding its geographic reach, focusing on its expansion in 3 critical markets: China, India, and the US. Table of contents The rise of ByteDance ByteDance was founded in 2012 and was originally based in a small apartment. It launched Toutiao, which remains one of its core products, later that year. The app caught on quickly, reaching 1M daily active users just 4 months after its launch. One factor that helped set the stage for ByteDance’s growth was China-based Alibaba’s massive IPO in 2014. When Alibaba debuted on the NYSE at a record-setting $25B valuation, more international investors started to look for similar success stories to emerge from the Chinese market. The result: a significant spike in capital flowing into Chinese tech companies — including ByteDance. Since 2014, the company has raised billions in disclosed venture funding. This enormous chest of capital has helped ByteDance to go head-to-head with one or more of the China-based BAT companies (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) in every vertical it targets, from Tencent in mobile gaming to Alibaba in e-commerce. 2/17 ByteDance’s products The viral video app TikTok is ByteDance’s most well-known property, particularly on the international stage. But the company is working on a large and rapidly expanding portfolio of products that span the major sectors of the modern internet economy, from news aggregation and search to music and mobile gaming. Each ByteDance product is built on the company’s edge in personalization and recommendation. ByteDance’s recommendation algorithms are the secret sauce that has fueled the company’s success since Toutiao. Similar to the algorithms employed by the likes of Facebook and YouTube, ByteDance’s algorithms analyze a user’s viewing behavior and use that data to recommend additional content that will keep the viewer engaged. Further, the user-generated content incentivizes individuals to create more content, and therefore spend more time on the app. The result is an addictive user experience that keeps users in the app for long spans of time — 52 minutes per day on average, in the case of TikTok. That metric puts TikTok on par with Instagram (53 minutes) and Snapchat (50 minutes), and substantially ahead of YouTube (40 minutes). So far, ByteDance has generated revenue mostly through advertising and in-app purchases. The effectiveness of ByteDance’s personalization algorithm for advertising is such that the company more than quadrupled its share of the advertising market against BAT in 2 years, rising from 5% in 2017 to an estimated 22% in 2019, according to Totem Media. 3/17 Source: Technode Broadly, ByteDance’s products can be divided into 3 categories: media and entertainment, internet, and a long tail of miscellaneous ventures. Media and entertainment On the media and entertainment front, ByteDance’s efforts hinge on user-generated content and virality — facilitated via the company’s highly sophisticated algorithmic recommendation engines. With many spending more time at home, the Covid-19 outbreak could act as an accelerant to ByteDance’s efforts in the media and entertainment space. TikTok alone reportedly saw an 18% weekly increase in US downloads between March 16 and March 22, the period when many lockdown orders started to take effect across the country. Video 4/17 TikTok — and its equivalent for the Chinese market, Douyin — is ByteDance’s audience- growing engine, and its clearest bid to compete head-to-head with global tech powers like Facebook. Source: Sensor Tower On the surface, TikTok bears a strong resemblance to its many social media forebears. The app is built around short, 15- to 60-second video clips created by users — similar to the now-defunct Vine. The app makes use of hashtags and filters, similar to platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, and Instagram. But a closer look reveals how TikTok deploys its sophisticated algorithms to ramp up the social media experience. Unlike social media predecessors like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where users’ feeds are made up primarily of their own social network or people they choose to follow, TikTok’s user experience is primarily driven by algorithms. The app’s “For You” page is continually populated with new videos based on the videos they’ve watched and engaged with in the past. The brevity of the videos means that content comes fast, and each subsequent video a user engages with becomes another data point in their profile, which the algorithm then uses to serve up more personalized content to keep the user engaged. TikTok’s algorithm doesn’t just recommend content for users to watch — it also recommends content for users to create, supplying a running catalog of viral hashtags, challenges, and memes for users to imitate. The fact that the app is built around discovery rather than the user’s existing network also means that it’s easier for users’ content to be seen by others, incentivizing users to keep creating content in the hope of racking up views. 5/17 The algorithmic curation and incentives drive a sticky, addictive user experience with engagement metrics that handily outperform those of many other social media platforms. The average session duration on TikTok was 294 seconds as of October 2018, compared with Facebook’s 208 seconds, Instagram’s 144 seconds, and Snapchat’s 80 seconds, according to App Annie. Source: Digiday In addition to the advertising model typical of other social media apps, TikTok generates revenue from in-app purchases. Users purchase coins which they can give to their favorite creators, who can then exchange the coins for digital gifts. User spending on TikTok is increasing even faster than user acquisition: as of April 2020, lifetime user spending totaled $456M — more than 2.5x the $175M the app generated when it reached 1.5B downloads, according to Sensor Tower. While TikTok’s growth is unquestionably impressive, the app is not without its critics. TikTok’s algorithmic, engagement-driven business model places it squarely within the “attention economy,” which has drawn concerns about the associated psychological effects and the prevalence of user surveillance. For example, Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman recently said that TikTok’s technology for monitoring users was “truly terrifying.” There are also concerns about the app’s approach to user privacy. US senators called for investigations into the app’s privacy policies in response to reports that the company had not followed through on promises to delete content created by users under the age of 13. 6/17 Some US lawmakers have called for a national security probe into the app, citing concerns about how user data is utilized and whether the app censors content.