ByteDance - TikTok's Mother Company
- Filip Pleti
- Oct 30, 2020
- 3 min read
So TikTok now manages a big part of our generation's content consumption, but who manages TikTok? Who designed this app and what is the story of how it came to be what it is now?
Buckle up, buddy!
The company behind all this is called ‘ByteDance”. They are a tech start-up specialized in apps. They developed some of the most successful and used Chinese apps such as Neihan Duanzi which was this joke sharing app and Kuaishou which was more of a slice-of-life video sharing platform. Both of these apps were shut down in April 2018 by the country's top media regulators for reasons such as vulgar content and “promoting underage pregnancy” things that were not in line with the values of China’s regime. This was only the last blow they had to take… in that same month, another one of ByteDance's apps was taken down, a news app called Jinri Toutiao, this time with no specified reason of shutting them down. Nevertheless even back then a global buzz was created over ByteDance and investors flocked in, putting them on the map and compared with titans such as Uber.
In 2017 the company bought musical.ly. Some of you might remember these lip sync short videos that were viral back then. Taking over this platform was a huge opportunity for ByteDance as it was one of the rare occasions when a Chinese app was adopted by US consumers. Now how come that all of these ByteDance platforms become big and are quickly accepted by tech users worldwide. Easy answer, complicated explanation. The algorithm. The success of TikTok (known as Douyin in China) is mostly credited to its algorithm.
You might hear stuff such as “it’s so tailored to my taste” or that you don’t have to look for TikToks that the TikToks will find you and it’s more or less true. It’s one of the only platforms where you don't really need to put any work into the platform in order to curate its content, it does it for you. Skipped this cooking clip? Whoops, you accidentally told the algorithm you don't like courgettes… Rewatched this other clip? Yikes you just gave up good insights about yourself and your preferences. As much as we like to think of TikTok as a content creation business the real intentions of the company is to develop better and better algorithms, it just happens that offering people 10-20 second funny videos is a great way to gather that data.
This is not some maleficent new concept, the same approach (a complex algorithm) helped YouTube become what it is now. The only problem then is what does ByteDance want to do with all of this knowledge and data? We do not know. Let’s hope it’s just for finding niche dank memes.
To bring us up to date with what is happening with ByteDance’s star child, TikTok is now fighting Donald Trump in an argument over a safe way of allowing TikTok to stay in America as there are suspicions that the Chinese government is involved in the company."
Currently, negotiations are being held regarding the new company “TikTok Global” going public next year. For now, it looks like 20% of the shares will be owned by Walmart and Oracle (a silicon valley based multinational) which would supervise the company and offer the company entrance in America while the other 80% will most likely be owned ByteDance.
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I wonder what will happen in the near future. Big tech companies, such as Facebook, are not shy from buying out the competition. You think Amazon/Google/Facebook are looking for a takeover of TikTok in the near future?