How Good was TikTok's 2019?

ByteDance is Having a Good 2019

Learn from the best startups to see what can work.

TikTok is inheriting ex-Facebook employees, while giving them as much as 20% raises while moving into WhatsApp old dig. Something is certainly changing in the future of the social media landscape. So how to make sense of it all?

TikTok owner ByteDance is a $75 billion Chinese tech giant and in 2019 it has shown no sign of slowing down. It’s a decent bet to get much more investment from the AI phase of Softbank Vision Fund that will soon announce how many $ billions this startup is likely to get.

ByteDance is the creator of short video app TikTok and news aggregator service Toutiao. The way it is pivoting into mobile search to boost its own ecosystem as a prospective super platform is very exciting.

Its fundamentals and profitability future in Ads is also very strong. ByteDance is a clever company in how it combines AI, apps, global product-market fit and content with entertainment for young global netizens.

The company makes money mainly through advertising but it’s banking on new products to diversify its revenue streams. It is reportedly looking to get into new areas including smartphones and music streaming. It’s my pick one day in the future to take up radical improvements in R&D in the brain-computer-interface (BCI) area. This is because new layers that come over mobile on the internet, like Voice-AI and BCI, are on the way.

Pushing buttons with our thumbs just gets old, really fast.

Here’s what you might have missed about ByteDance in the first half of 2019. It booked revenues of $8.4 billion in a better-than-expected ($7 billion) result for the first half of this year.

Future guidance is also great. ByteDance posted a profit in June and was confident of making a profit in the second half of the year. According to online tech news outlet The Information, ByteDance revenue for the whole of 2018 was $7.2 billion.

The robust growth is sure to tantalize more potential investors. This company is nothing short of a product genius in app innovation and digital transformation, having roughly half the age and twice the smarts of Facebook.

All this hype of being the most valuable startup has also led the Beijing-based startup to revise its revenue target for 2019 to 120 billion yuan from an earlier goal set late last year of 100 billion yuan. This is all that you want a startup to be. Take notes, guys.

ByteDance is secretive but shows real talent in developing products across diversified spectrums of potential avenues for growth both as a B2C ecosystem of value and in apps that show incredible stickiness.

ByteDance is the one startup that best illustrates the relationship between personalization and content in the future of the attention economy.

The seven-year-old startup, which separate sources have said was valued at $78 billion late last year, also owns Chinese news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, meaning “Today’s Headlines,” as well as a domestic version of TikTok, known as Douyin.

While ByteDance is looking to sell TopBuzz, it hasn’t even scratched the surface of what it will one day become in mobile advertising.

Bytedance is trying to do away with products that are underperforming in order to focus on TikTok, the expansion of which has been guzzling considerable amounts of resources.

With Softbank Vision Fund on deck, ByteDance can plan incredible expansion. It also needs to shore up more global talent to “take on the world”.

Due to China being a censored state, ByteDance’s AI is also making headway in how to censor content that Chinese regulators deem offensive or in violation of their rules. This means as ByteDance’s ecosystem scales it might become better than Western behemoths at self-regulating platforms and apps.

More users, more apps, more censorship = better AI to personalize content. ByteDance has a trajectory unlike most startups will ever have in the 21st century in its B2C apps domain. If Google changed the future of the algorithm in the West, ByteDance could even supplant Baidu one day in how consumers search on mobile devices in China and in South and East Asia.

Founded in 2012 by tech entrepreneur Yiming Zhang, ByteDance quickly launched a suite of apps that’s showing more actual innovation than Facebook’s trinity of separate apps.

WIF (WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook) would struggle without advertising and ByteDance needs to optimize profitability in that domain to make Softbank’s investment worth it for the future of AI in China.

ByteDance has a number of successful apps that mean young Asians really trust the brand. It’s not all about TikTok. While most of the company’s revenue is garnered in China, expect that to change in the 2020s as the company continues to mature.

For me, it’s a candidate to acquire Snap Inc, since their cultures and production innovation have a similar vibe along with target audience. If that happened, it would be an “existential” reckoning for the likes of Facebook. For entrepreneurs who want to make it, study how ByteDance’s CEO made it in China’s ultra competitive app ecosystem.

The best compete against the best and win. ByteDance isn’t just having a good 2019, it’s showing how it could dominate in the decade ahead as social media and micro video stories themselves evolve into viral memes, and how young people seek digital experiences is changing with more creative interactions and editing.

The “TikTok effect” has transformed how pre-teens and teenagers globally view apps. A world where Instagram is boring, Facebook is for old people and how startups scale means actually improving the UX with AI. Being agile in the B2C space means constantly innovating.

Nobody in 2019 demonstrates this like the “Rainbow Unicorn” ByteDance. “Rainbow” because of the variety of its apps and its diversified approaches to scaling as a startup. It’s already platform-centric in its approach to building a suite of sticky consumer apps.

For prospective startups and entrepreneurs, there are a slew of treasures to be mined by ByteDance’s emergence as the most profitable global technology startup. For info about this company, I recommend SCMP, TechNode, TechInAsia and Business Insider, among others like myself who obsess over social media trends.

Consider this, short video platform Douyin has 500 million MAU in China as of January 2019, a figure which doesn’t include global users of its overseas version, TikTok. ByteDance has exploded in India in 2019 and shown signs of expansion, not just in China and South East Asia, but globally. If Facebook’s users are aging, ByteDance’s users are getting younger.

Follow a Futurist, sign up to receive blog-rolls about breaking news in Business and Technology & related Op-Eds.