Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
For Douyin, the presence of arts content as dominant verticals echoes the attentions of the platform’s early millennial adopters. “It started with a core user base of trendy urbanites and art students in the early 20s demographic,” says Matthew Brennan, author ofAttention Factory, a book chronicling the rise of parent company ByteDance. “By 2018, Douyin had gone fully mainstream.” Douyin’s warp speed growth was encapsulated by October 2017 during which the app’s users jumped from seven to 14 million and the average time spent in the app doubled to 40 minutes. The growth signaled a reach far beyond the initial Millennial and Gen Z users, and prompted a change of slogan to the all-encompassing “Record Beautiful Life.” Three years on, that vision includes “more than the classic dance, lip-sync, and comic content categories,” says Brennan, and touches upon the full spectrum of cultural content.
Embroidery is one such area. “I had some craft skills before, but I’ve really learned a lot through watching short-videos [on Douyin and Kuaishou],” says Han Yunyin, a retiree in Shanxi province. “Seeing other people’s [embroidery] abilities inspires me to buy more materials and continue making more myself.”
This cultural focus is increasingly driven by ByteDance itself. With more than 600 million daily active users, Douyin appears to have saturated the domestic market — though such predictions in the past have proved premature — and the Beijing-based company’s focus has turned to maintaining its audiences and extending user time, stickiness in industry parlance. Similar to YouTube, Douyin’s appeal rests with content not socializing, says Brennan, and with product teams having seemingly exhausted in-app innovations, the focus will rest on ensuring Douyin platforms unique, quality content. Arts and education are key to this strategy with Douyin self-identifying as China’s largest knowledge, culture, and art platform with nearly 15 million knowledge-based content videos in 2019.
The application uses a very powerful recommendation algorithm, which adapts to needs and interests of each one of the accounts associated with your database. Proof that this mechanism works is that, as of today, it has registered 800 million monthly active users.
In an interview with BBC Mundo magazine, Chinese technology and innovation specialist Matthew Brennan highlighted the following regarding the engineering team that TikTok has:
«There is no small team behind. It is one of the largest internet companies in China. Employs thousands of people. If TikTok has grown so fast is due to the experience of its engineers as it operates the best recommendation engine in the competitive Chinese market.>>
According to Brennan, author of Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance, this platform is being a major rival to Instagram and YouTube. Both social networks offer the option to upload videos of different lengths, which people search in their spare time according to your personal interests or search for individual social status.
What is the difference with other similar platforms?
The main difference that Brennan finds with other digital platforms, such as YouTube or Netflix, is that the user does not interact with the screen. In the case of TikTok, yes. For this reason, the app receives much more feedback from its consumers.
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.
“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?
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.
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?
London-based branding expert Arnold Ma discusses what the Tiktok deal with Oracle and Walmart might mean for its users outside China, at the state broadcaster CGTN. Who is hosting the user data is the key question to ask, he says.
Harry Broadman might have earned his stripes in working in the US administration, the handling of the Tiktok deal filled him with “utter amazement”, he tells at Marketwatch. “Why issue the executive order if you are going to negotiate that way?” Broadman asks.
Marketwatch:
Harry Broadman, a managing director at global consulting firm Berkeley Research Group and a senior fellow of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has a long history in Washington that includes serving as a member of the government board tasked with figuring out these issues, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., or CFIUS, in the 1990s. He told MarketWatch he was in “utter amazement” as to how the TikTok deal was being handled.
“I follow this minute-by-minute, literally, [and] speak to clients and reporters call all the time,” he said. “This is the challenge of assessing things — we really don’t know anything with certainty, other than the principals involved. I don’t know anyone on CFIUS who knows the full contours of what has been discussed.”
For a while, London was in the running to get the Tiktok international headquarters, but under the Tiktok-Oracle deal the UK’s capital seems to have lost that opportunity, says China internet watcher Matthew Brennanto CNBC. That seems another setback for the UK now the country is already suffering under the corona crisis and Brexit.
CNBC:
Less than a month ago, there was talk of putting TikTok’s international headquarters in London, but that looks increasingly unlikely.
“Assuming the Oracle/Walmart deal goes through, then the HQ for TikTok Global for sure is in the States,” said Matthew Brennan, a social media analyst based in China.
“For London to be the HQ of a company like TikTok would have been a coup for the city, but alas it seems not to be,” Brennan told CNBC, adding that it would have greatly raised the prestige of London in terms of attracting international tech talent.
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 Brennanto 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.
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.
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 Yuon 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.
Did get Oracle the Tiktok deal because it cozied up to the US president more than any of the other US companies, wonders international trade expert Harry Broadman at CNBC. Many questions remain after Microsoft was replaced by Oracle.
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
