There are several types of TikTok ads, including In-Feed ads, Brand Takeovers, and Branded Hashtag Challenges. And while TikTok has taken steps to distance itself from its Beijing parent company, both the Trump administration and some Republicans https://traderoom.info/ and Democrats in Congress fear the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok as a tool to spy on Americans. It also has a stake in Indian news app Dailyhunt, Indonesian news aggregator Babe, and Singaporean productivity suite Lark, among others.

If you haven’t heard of ByteDance, you will have definitely heard of its biggest app, TikTok (also known as Douyin in China), the viral short-video app taking over the world one smartphone at a time. TikTok is now the third most downloaded non-game app in the world, behind only WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and has been downloaded 1.57 billion times as of March 2020, with nearly half of those downloads in 2019 alone. The company has denied it is used to “target” US citizens in the wake of the Forbes report. In response to the BuzzFeed report, a TikTok spokesperson said the company has talked openly about its efforts to limit employees’ access to US user data and the BuzzFeed News report shows TikTok is “doing what it said it was going to”. Several technical researchers at ByteDance, which owns the wildly popular social platform TikTok, and other researchers from Northwestern Polytechnical University, a school in China known for its work with the nation’s military, created StreamVoice. Northwestern Polytechnical University is not affiliated with Northwestern University in the US.

1. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.
2. It enables users to create servers or join existing ones, each with its channels and permissions.
3. In March 2023, The FBI and DOJ launched an investigation into TikTok and asked TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew to appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
4. Now, TikTok is one of just 6 social media apps with more than 1 billion monthly active users.
5. ByteDance is the developer of the video-sharing social networking services and apps TikTok and Douyin, the Chinese-specific counterpart to TikTok.

It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.

ByteDance—About

TikTok has now been permanently banned in India for the foreseeable future along with 48 other Chinese apps due to rising political tensions between those neighbouring countries. The UK government has also been investigating whether TikTok has deployed sufficient measures to protect children on the app. In one recording a member of TikTok’s trust and safety department said “everything is seen in China”, according to BuzzFeed. Discord develops a communications platform enabling friends to come together to play games.

Since than ByteDance has been in negotiations with several US companies. The current front runners are software multinational Oracle and retail corporation Walmart, with reports that the deal will give the two companies a combined 20% stake in a new entity, TikTok Global. For others, data is less of a concern than the platform’s potential for manipulation of opinion. Matt Schrader, an adviser on China at the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit organisation, says the data issue is a “sideshow”. ByteDance has over 150,000 employees based out of nearly 120 cities globally, including Austin, Barcelona, Beijing, Berlin, Dubai, Dublin, Hong Kong, Jakarta, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Seattle, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, and Tokyo.

ByteDance’s revenue in 2020 doubled to $37B. Is an IPO next?

In 2009, Fanfou was shut down owing to certain controversies, and that very year, Yiming started his very first startup 99fang.com, which is a real estate search portal. Meanwhile, smartphones began to take over and more and more people started using smartphones, and Yiming could very well see the opportunity underlying it, which made him leave 99fang.com to start ByteDance in 2012. Earlier this year the president issued an executive order effectively banning the app’s use in the US, and said he would not allow the app to operate in the country unless it was owned by an American company.

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. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok.

In India, where TikTok had more than 200 million users, the government in September 2020 banned the platform and dozens of other Chinese apps, after warning that user data was being mined and profiled “by elements hostile to national security and defence of India”. It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia. ByteDance also launched Toutiao, a news aggregation app which uses algorithms to suggest articles and videos to users, in 2012. It’s one of the largest news aggregation apps in China and is installed on over 250 million monthly unique devices, according to data from Chinese market research firm, iResearch. ByteDance does not regularly release official user numbers for its apps.

Compare ByteDance to Competitors

One of its earliest and core products is Toutiao, or Jinri Toutiao, which literally translates to “Today’s Headlines”. Toutiao is an AI-powered news aggregator, which uses algorithms to curate news easymarkets articles and videos based on users’ previous behaviour on the app. This high-level of personalisation makes the app highly addictive, with the average Toutiao user spending 74 minutes a day on it.

ByteDance—Funding & Investors

Talking about valuation, ByteDance is reportedly worth over US$100 billion as of May 2020 based on recent prices for the Chinese company’s shares on secondary markets, according to the Financial Times. Thus now ByteDance is valued over one-third higher than that in November 2018, when it was valued at around $ 75-$78 billion. Its troubles in the US have been well publicised, with Trump calling for a ban on TikTok, citing threats to national security and users’ privacy. But Bytedance have also run into trouble in other countries – in India, for example, TikTok was temporarily shut down in April 2019 as a state ruling said it was spreading pornography.

It enables users to create servers or join existing ones, each with its channels and permissions. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco, California. Now, TikTok is one of just 6 social media apps with more than 1 billion monthly active users. This attempt to stay low-profile is perhaps to try to deflect the attention of regulators both in China and overseas. Woodward says that even if there is no evidence that TikTok is doing anything with user data other than what is being done by the other major social media platforms, the background presence of China will remain difficult to shake for sceptics.

He says considerable doubt is generated by China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, which states that all organisations and citizens shall “support, assist and cooperate” with national intelligence efforts. TikTok’s approach to data gathering is more aggressive than WeChat, the Chinese super app that performs multiple functions from messaging to ride-hailing, according to David Robinson, co-chief executive of Internet 2.0. This, the order claimed, paves the way for China to track the locations of government employees, build dossiers for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.