The Tiktok playbook – Matthew Brennan

 

Matthew Brennan

Douyin – the Chinese name of Tiktok – became a runaway success as a short-video platform in China. Tech watcher Matthew Brennan looks in his book ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’ at the playbook Bytedance used for their lift-off before they took the platform global. An excerpt from Techcrunch.

Matthew Brennan:

Hundreds of fashionably dressed young people were arriving at 751 D.PARK, an expanse of industrial plants redeveloped into a hip culture venue in northeast Beijing. They were clad in baseball caps, brightly colored dresses, loose-fitting hip-hop style streetwear and limited-edition sneakers. The site had been transformed into something akin to the stage of the talent competition “American Idol,” spanning two floors filled with strobe lighting, high-volume music and trendy backdrops. This was an exclusive party — three hundred top Douyin creators coming together to celebrate the app’s one-year anniversary.

The online stars, billed as the “new generation of internet celebrities,” weren’t there to just socialize and enjoy themselves. Every influencer was aware of the unspoken competition to derive the best content from that night. They were all fighting to achieve a higher level of superstardom and the medium of battle was short video.

The influencers who knew each other gathered in small groups as their assistants tirelessly captured fifteen-second videos of their carefully crafted skits. Loners roamed around the dance floor, absorbed in finding the ideal lighting for their lip-syncing selfie videos. Lesser-known influencers nervously approached more famous ones, proposing to record a dance together to potentially tap into their peers’ following. Loud hip-hop music kept playing in the background as creators hurried to touch up the videos they had just shot. Once the editing was done, they uploaded their works and anxiously waited for the app’s algorithms to judge who would grab more eyeballs.

Dance teams took to the stage to display their skills. The crowd bopped their heads back and forth as rappers attempted to impress with clever lyrics. Later as the hosts were midway through giving out awards, a wave of noise erupted from the back of the crowd interrupting the proceedings.

It was Yiming. Dressed in a black baseball cap and gray T-shirt and accompanied by Lidong. The audience went wild — the CEO had decided to drop in unannounced! Immediately he was bombarded with requests to take pictures and videos. As those around him whooped and cried out wildly, the entrepreneur simply smiled and kept his hands calmly by his side, an awkward 34-year-old engineer type among the hyper fashionable, mostly teenage hip-hop crowd.

He already knew from looking at the data, but this was confirmation in the flesh — Douyin had built a robust community, with powerful momentum and was on the verge of doing something special.

October 1st marks the beginning of “Golden Week,” a seven-day-long official Chinese national holiday. Periods like these are big opportunities for China’s internet industry. People’s behaviors change for a week; many find more time for entertainment and to try new things.

Over October, Douyin’s daily users doubled from seven to 14 million; two months later, they reached 30 million. Over those three months, the 30-day retention rates jumped from eight to over 20%, the average time spent in the app soared from 20 to 40 minutes. It was as if some magic rocket fuel had suddenly been added, boosting every key metric. What had changed?

The answer was Zhu Wenjia. Zhu Wenjia, hired from Baidu in 2015, was widely considered to be one of the top-three best people in the entire company when it came to algorithm technology. He ran one of ByteDance’s most capable engineering teams and had recently been assigned to work on Douyin. The team’s work harnessing the full power of ByteDance’s content recommendation back end led directly to the astounding October results.

More at Techcrunch.

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How TikTok became a runaway success in the US – Matthew Brennan

 

Matthew Brennan

Most Chinese tech companies tried to figure out what US consumers wanted before they entered the market, but Bytedance did not care when it launched Tiktok in 2018, says internet veteran Matthew Brennan in his book “Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance.” The lack of strategy almost backfired, but after some hiccups, the company became a runaway success, Brennan writes in an excerpt in Technode.

Technode:

“Why are moms using Tiktok? Why is anyone using Tiktok?” shouted the world’s most popular Youtuber towards the camera. It was late 2018 and Swedish gamer Pewdiepie was recording his second of fifteen “Tiktok Cringe Compila­tion” videos after the first had proved to be a hit. Each episode was ten minutes of him reacting to painfully embarrassing Tiktok videos.

Tiktok hadn’t paid anything to Pewdiepie. The A-list global internet mega-celebrity was creating video after video about Tiktok because his audience loved it. This should have been the kind of authentic influencer promotion that online marketers dreamed of. Every video was essentially a free ten-minute advert for Tiktok distributed out to a loyal 80 million follower base. Yet, at the same time, Pewdiepie wasn’t exactly endorsing the app.

Tiktok was bizarre. An endless stream of people posting weird con­tent with almost a total lack of self-awareness. Mindless comedy skits, lip-syncing, and just outright wacky oddball creations. The kids making these videos could be forgiven; they were just kids. But the adults posting on the app came off simply as creepy and weird. Countless numbers of Tiktok cringe compilations started appearing on Youtube, many with mil­lions of views. Criticism of the app became widespread, with the sham­ing of Tiktok users becoming a regular occurrence on Twitter and Reddit.

In China, Douyin, the domestic version of Tiktok also operated by Bytedance, had first garnered attention as a popular app for ur­ban youths, associating itself with art students and fashionable hip-hop lovers. Yet in America, it was the absolute opposite. Tiktok had entered the public consciousness as a cringe app for losers and misfits. What was going on?

More in Technode.

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The splintering of the global internet – Kaiser Kuo

 

Kaiser Kuo

China veteran Kaiser Kuo discusses the relations between the US and China, and here focuses on the splintering of the internet, at a wide-ranging interview at the Wire China. “I also think we need to recognize that our worries are more about us than they are about China. We have in this country a real problem with surveillance capitalism, as it’s been called,” says Kaiser Kuo.

Wire China:

Given that first narrative switch you described — the now-accepted idea that technology has not led to a more open political system in China — many people talk about the splintering of the global internet. Do you think a splintering is inevitable?

To some extent, we have to recognize that there has already been a splintering when it comes to a lot of popular services on the internet. A lot of that owes to China’s very severe regime of internet censorship. But I worry about the United States accepting this as a norm and simply going along with it and imposing these same types of objectionable ideas that run so counter to our core values. I think the impact of it is not so much economic as it is moral, and it would be a betrayal of our values to embrace this. I think we should all be working to have a more open internet rather than acquiescing, and proactively helping it toward this other outcome — a splintered, fragmented, and decoupled internet.

I also think we need to recognize that our worries are more about us than they are about China. We have in this country a real problem with surveillance capitalism, as it’s been called. Our concerns over Chinese tech have been amplified in large measures by our worries about how American tech companies are treating our data, and following our every click online and targeting us with greater and greater precision.

Let me put it this way: the Trump administration and its moves against companies like Tencent’s WeChat and Bytedance’s TikTok were clearly never about national security. They were never about data privacy. We’ve seen that now. It’s clear, at least to me, that they were about this broader project of suppressing China’s technology prowess, and were very much of a piece with what we’ve done with Huawei. There are important differences between them, of course. And I think from a national security point of view, you could certainly make a stronger case for Huawei being of concern. But when you look at WeChat, which has users only in the single digit millions in the United States, almost all of them are either Americans with strong connections to China or are Chinese nationals or ethnic Chinese. That national security case is very weak. With TikTok, it’s almost laughable.

The WeChat and TikTok ban is a good example of how many American lawmakers view the U.S.-China tech competition as a zero-sum game. Are there areas where you could imagine productive cooperation in technology between the two countries?

I think if you look back over the last 30 years, cooperation in technology has been fantastically fruitful. Let’s start with immigration policy. The Trump administration is going after H-1B visas and trying to restrict the ability of ethnically Chinese scientists, researchers or technologists to participate in research in the United States. All these things are shooting ourselves in the foot and surrendering, or deliberately blowing up, what is probably the single greatest advantage that this country has had in technology. You only have to look at the great companies of Silicon Valley, Seattle, or Boston, and look at a list of the surnames to realize what kind of contribution is being made by people who the Trump administration’s Department of Justice is targeting through its China initiative, that Homeland Security is trying to prevent from entering this country, and that the Trump administration is attempting to demonize. Part of productive technology cooperation would be stopping this utterly feckless policy and reversing it. We can do that and still protect American national security interests if we put a little more trust into the natural immune system of an open society.

More at the Wire China.

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Will China approve the Tiktok deal, and what is next? – Shirley Yu

 

Shirley Yu

A US judge has delayed US President Trump’s action on Tiktok, and now the Chinese government is watching closely what happens after November 12, the next deadline, says political economist Shirley Yu at Bloomberg. And what will Tencent do, now a ban on WeChat is still pending?

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Tiktok’s growth: you ain’t seen nothing yet – Matthew Brennan

 

Bytedance’s Tiktok, known in China as Douyin, has for the first time disclosed some of the figures on its usage. Tiktok is only starting to grow, says internet watcher Matthew Brennan to CNBC. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, it’s still getting started,” he added.

CNBC:

Duoyin and TikTok are both owned by Beijing-headquartered ByteDance. Over the last few weeks, ByteDance has released some closely-guarded user numbers that show just how popular both apps are.

On Tuesday, it said Douyin hit 600 million daily active users in August. The announcement came a day after TikTok revealed more than 100 million people across Europe are active on TikTok every month. And last month, TikTok announced it had 100 million monthly active U.S. users.

Slowly but surely, ByteDance is painting a picture of how many people use its video sharing apps in each region.

Brennan thinks that China is two years ahead of the U.S. and Europe when it comes to short video. “The big question is the ceiling,” he said. “Where will TikTok/Douyin usage top out? If China hasn’t reached that ceiling yet, that means TikTok very likely has at least two to three years of strong growth left.”

Brennan pointed out that Douyin had 200 million daily active users in 2018. “Now it’s 600 million…that’s an instructive bellwether for TikTok’s potential growth in Europe and the U.S. for 2020-2022,” he said.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet, it’s still getting started,” he added.

More at CNBC.

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China fears Tiktok deal is only the start of more – Shirley Yu

 

Shirley Yu

Attention has been focused on the expected purchase of Bytedance’s Tiktok by Oracle, but authorities in Beijing fear this will only be the start of more pressure on Chinese tech companies, says political economist Shirley Yu on CNN.

CNN:

“Beijing wants to protect its ascending status in global technology,” said Shirley Yu, visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and founder of an eponymous company that assesses strategy, business, and political risk for companies working in China.

If the United States succeeds in forcing TikTok to sell key tech to an American company, “China would be concerned that, as its technology companies continue to ascend, more Chinese companies … might be targeted by the United States in a similar way,” she said.

More at CNN.

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Why Oracle might be the best buyer for Bytedance's Tiktok - Matthew Brennan

Oracle has taken over Microsoft as the preferred buyer of Bytedance's Tiktok in the US after the Chinese company got into problems with US President Donald Trump. Innovation expert Matthew Brennan says Oracle might be the better match as a buyer of Tiktok, he tells in Coinspeaker.

Coinspeaker:

ByteDance will be the overall decision-maker on who to sell its product to. Preferably, one that will offer the best cash deal, which both Oracle and Microsoft are capable of anyway, or one that will not pose a direct competition threat in future for its venture, where Oracle highly wins.

“The perfect company for Bytedance to sell to is one with deep enough pockets to pay a good price,” said Matthew Brennan, a social media analyst in Beijing.

Brennan added that the buyer should be “good enough at tech to actually run all the advanced AI (artificial intelligence that TikTok has)” but weak enough at consumer mobile that they would avoid arming a future competitor. “By these measures, Oracle sounds like a good fit,” said Brennan.

Oracle is actively providing the CIA with its database software solution, and the acquisition of China’s huge tech company might be a gateway to spying the Chinese market.

In addition, Oracle’s acquisition of TikTok will be a plus for the struggling company to venture into new markets and presumably the social media industry.

More in Coinspeaker.

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How can the US win an economic war with China? – Shirley Ze Yu

Shirley Ze Yu

Derailing China’s economic reforms is the only way the US can stop losing its leverage as the largest economy in the world, says political economist Shirley Ze Yu in the South China Morning Post. Improved market liberalization has every time helped China to improve its economic position, and the US has no other alternative to win this fight instead of blocking market forces in China, she argues.

Shirley Ze Yu:

It is understandable that the world’s predominant economic power wants to win an economic war against China, but how? One way is for the US economy to rise faster than China’s. The other is to stifle China’s rise.

It is hard to see any major technological breakthrough on the horizon in the US that would induce a significant economic take-off. Until that happens, the second-best strategy for the US is to damage

the Chinese economy.

Some of China’s hi-tech companies are under siege. TikTok and WeChat have been put on the White House 45-day banned list on August 6. Trump administration officials have also suggested that Chinese companies listed in the US should be delisted by January 2022 if they cannot comply with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s audit requirements.

Sifting through more than 70 years of the People’s Republic of China’s history, every period in which the Chinese economy has thrived has been accompanied by deeper liberal market reforms. Every major round of liberal market reform has unleashed enormous amounts of economic vitality.

Greater market liberalisation will therefore put China on a more robust economic growth track, pushing the nation towards the commanding heights of the global economy even faster than current projections.

The US, in principle, wants to see a more liberal China. In practice, though, it will benefit from an illiberal China by winning the economic war.

Ultimately, it is better to defeat an enemy without having to fight, rather than winning every battle, according to ancient wisdom. Thus, the most expedient way of winning for the US would be to derail the liberal market reform
process in China.

More at the South China Morning Post.

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Why Tiktok’s sale to Microsoft might be a good deal for Bytedance – Arnold Ma

Bytedance is negotiating the sale of popular video streaming app Tiktok with Microsoft, now it became into hot water with an executive ban by US President Donald Trump. Business analyst Arnold Ma tells CGTN why that might be a good deal for Bytedance, since it has 60 apps in China, not just a few like most tech companies, and might focus on those other apps. Even the price, 10 billion US dollars for a company valued at 120 billion, is not bad for an app that only exists for three years, he adds.

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Why Bytedance might sell Tiktok to Microsoft despite opposition - William Bao Bean

William Bao Bean

Chinese internet users have been voicing loud opposition against the possible deal by Bytedance to sell Tiktok to Microsoft, as the company might be hit by a ban by US President Donald Trump. But the verdict by startups and investors in China has been milder, says Shanghai-based VC William Bao Bean to Techcrunch. 

Techcrunch:

Startups and investors in China are more sympathetic toward ByteDance. Many agree that if the Microsoft deal goes through, it could be the least bad outcome for TikTok. 

“They are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” said William Bao Bean, general partner at Chinaccelerator, a cross-border accelerator backed by SOSV. “We are in a fast-changing regulatory environment. I think the consumers would probably want to continue using the service, and this is one potential way to make that happen. Obviously, I don’t think it’s what ByteDance really wants.”... 

The tech community is well aware that TikTok is a rarity. Although the backlash will have a chilling effect on Chinese companies expanding to the US, and potentially other Western markets, there simply aren’t many internet companies going from China to the West in the first place. 

“Most solutions that are built for China don’t solve problems that people have in the West,” observed Bao Bean.

More at Techcrunch.

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Is TikTok meeting its Waterloo moment? - Shirley Ze Yu

Shirley Ze Yu

After a ban in India, short-video giant TikTok might be on the hit list of US Secretary of State Pompeo for a ban in the US too. Is US$100 billion unicorn Bytedance, TikTok's Chinese mother company, meeting its Waterloo moment, wonders political economist Shirley Ze Yu at her China in 60"

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China tops 2019 global unicorn list - Rupert Hoogewerf

Rupert Hoogewerf

Three Chinese companies, Ant Financial, Didi Chuxing and Bytedance top the inaugural global unicorn list 2019 for startups in this century, says Hurun chief researcher Rupert Hoogewerf according to the CEO Magazine.

CEO Magazine:

The 10 top unicorns, businesses created in the 2000s, are worth US$542 billion, according to Hurun Research. 

Hurun Research Institute has released the inaugural Hurun Global Unicorn List for 2019. All the top unicorns are not on a stock exchange and valuations are a snapshot on 30 June. 

“We have found just under 500 unicorns in the world. The Hurun Global Unicorn List 2019 is designed to inspire entrepreneurship among wannabe entrepreneurs and encourage investors. These young companies, only seven years old on average, are the world’s most exciting start-ups, leading a new generation in disruptive technology,” said Hurun Report Chairman and Chief Researcher Rupert Hoogewerf, also known by his Chinese name Hú Rùn. 

Hurun Research Institute found 494 unicorns in the world, based in 25 countries and 118 cities. They were created seven years ago on average, are worth US$3.4 billion on average and US$1.7 trillion in total.

More at the CEO Magazine.

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Bytedance: beyond Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent - Ashley Dudarenok

Ashley Dudarenok

Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok dives into the fast-changing landscape of China's internet, especially Bytedance. The relative newcomer has become an established player next to the old trinity of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (BAT). She looks at some of Bytedance's major operations: Jinri Toutiao and Douyin, and Bytebance international expansion for Asia Times.

Ashley Dudarenok:

ByteDance has ambitious expansion plans outside China. Founder and CEO Zhang Yiming announced at the company's sixth year-end gala in March 2018 that the company wants to become a global content creation and communication platform and that they will focus on globalization this year. 

ByteDance recently attracted notice in the West after acquiring Musical.ly, the mobile app that's very popular among young people in the US Topbuzz, the English version of Toutiao was also launched in North and South America three years ago to expand its global presence. The rising giant also bought France-based media aggregation service News Republic in 2017 and invested in Indian news app Dailyhunt in 2016. 

Outside of news aggregation, ByteDance also wants to increase its market share in video platforms and mobile entertainment apps. It acquired US video creation app Flipagram in early 2017. Then in November 2017, it invested $50 million in Live.me, a successful mobile streaming app that's focused on the US market. 

By rolling out its own products and acquiring others, ByteDance has successfully amplified its global presence to grab market share in Japan, India, Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and South America. Yet the brand itself is not as well-known as the top three – BAT – locally or overseas. Many people have only heard of their apps and can't connect them to their parent company. As a result, in April 2018, Toutiao confirmed that they will use 'ByteDance' from now on as the brand name for external communication and marketing. This is an obvious signal that ByteDance is gearing up for branding and firmly establishing its image as an industry leader in China's tech scene and beyond.

More at Asia Times.

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WeChat starts to tell stories, at last - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan

China's most popular short-messages platform WeChat has at last included Snapchat/Instagram style stories. Long overdue, says Tencent and WeChat specialist Matthew Brennan at his website. He tells how it works, and why - if very late - this is a smart move.

Matthew Brennan:

WeChat is coming pretty late to the stories game. For much of 2017-18, we’ve seen them totally focused on building up the mini-programs platform, which might explain some of the lateness. Also worth noting that adding stories into the complex WeChat experience in a meaningful and impactful way without disruption of the existing ecosystem balance is tricky and not without risk. 

But the real reason why we haven’t seen WeChat embrace moments to date is likely to be founder Alan Zhang’s insistence on positioning WeChat as a tool for productively and efficiency rather than one that tries to keep users coming back to waste time. 

Yet it’s likely that the pressure from Tencent head office to leverage WeChat to fight against Bytedance and their flagship short video platform Douyin (TikTok) is proving too much. With WeChat 7.0 we’ve finally seen WeChat make an indirect but bold move into short video. 

Overall I’m pretty positive on how they’ve adapted the stories format to WeChat with this new update. I expect this feature to have a significant impact on WeChat usage habits, increasing stickiness and time spent in the app and negatively impacting consumption of other forms of short video in the China market. There will probably be some degree of cannibalization to traffic on the moments newsfeed also. 

Stories have proven to be an immersive and engaging format across many different apps. The ephemeral nature of the format (24 hrs and they disappear) naturally drives users to return. The original innovation came from SnapChat who Tencent previously looked at acquiring and now own 17% of parent company Snap. 

The most important entry point for traffic into this new feature might be groups and 1on1 conversations, not the newsfeed (Interestingly Facebook also introduced stories into Facebook groups this month). Messaging is traditionally an inhospitable environment for monetization. From a platform owner’s perspective, it’s not simple to monetize chat conversations, you can’t put adverts in there without seriously disrupting the user experience. 

Tencent have done well with cracking this tough nut, firstly using lucky money in chat conversations as a way to kick-start WeChat Pay and secondly with sharing of mini-programs in groups as a way to foster e-commerce (e.g. Pinduoduo). Stories could be a third way to leverage the huge traffic of chat conversations as they can be monetized with ads and full-screen auto-play video ads at that; no wonder Facebook is trying to stuff stories everywhere they can. 

Tencent is conservative with ad inventory, so I expect it will be quite some time before we see ads in WeChat Stories (if ever), but certainly the potential is there for them to turn on the taps if need be. In the short to mid-term, the primary benefit will be increased stickiness and engagement mostly at the expense of competitors. 

Tencent must know that chat conversations are the real key to both WeChat traffic and monetization. They might be reluctant to place more pressure on the newsfeed where traffic has been falling or official accounts that have also seen declines in page views. Chat conversations have incredibly high value to users and unlike in newsfeeds, Tencent’s position is highly resilient to competition.

More at the ChinaChannel.

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What the heck is Bytedance - Ashley Dudarenok

Ashley Dudarenok

The unicorn Bytedance is worth US$750 billion, an international big hit on news distribution, exploiting AI in a sensational way, but hardly known to many. China veteran Ashley Dudarenok explains why is not owned by Alibaba, Tencent but independent on the market, and making a blast.

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The threat for Tencent: competitors like Bytedance - Matthew Brennan

Matthew Brennan

China's internet giant Tencent had a rocky week with less than stellar quarterly figures and a government ban of a successful game. But while Tencent keeps on doing well, English language media have missed a major threat for Tencent, says internet expert Matthew Brennan on his China Channel website. Competitors like Bytedance and Tik Tok undermine the giant, he says.

Matthew Brennan:

The rivalry between Tencent and Bytedance has been dissected endlessly by Chinese media, surprisingly (to me at least) much less has made it over to English. The rise of Bytedance’s micro-video application Douyin, known internationally as Tik Tok, is surely one of, if not THE major success story of China’s internet industry in the first half of 2018. 

Bytedance has proved themselves to be very capable. They are far from a one trick pony and now have a family of apps (a-la Facebook) with two major knock-the-ball-out-of-the-park successes, the original newsfeed aggregation app “Daily Headline” known as Jinritoutiao in China and now the even bigger success of Douyin. 

Why is this both an important long-term problem for Tencent? 

Tencent’s losing it’s grip on attention a little. Entertainment is a zero-sum battle. A user can’t spend time on Tencent’s properties if they are busy scrolling through micro-videos on Bytedance’s platforms. The situation is by no means critical but it’s concerning. It certainly should be concerning to investors and much more so I believe than a temporary blip in gaming revenue. 

This shift in attention is not showing up that strongly in Tencent’s financials currently; the online advertisement segment did okay this quarter. Tencent is still a very conservative organization (famously so in fact) when it comes to ads monetization and there’s plenty of runway still. Yet even if Tencent did lose many eyeballs which they weren’t really doing a great job of monetizing anyway, why as an investor should I care? 

Because Bytedance has built an alternative Chinese ecosystem of news and entertainment apps which, while smaller, now rivals Tencent’s ecosystem for where Chinese users will go to kill time on their phones, where advertisers look to spend ad yuan online and where media or influencers look to distribute content. They’ve done the hard work and built up a lot more than just a foothold (see chart above). Whatever direction they choose to take things from here the next steps will be easier than the previous ones, they have momentum. 

Tencent has a nimble and dangerous independent competitor of scale in the local market eating up time from their pan-entertainment empire. That’s what investors should be concerned about. The $75 billion* USD problem.

More at the China Channel. Matthew Brennan is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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