The rise of Douyin, Tiktok

TikTok users are expanding quickly worldwide.

Presented as the favorite social network by GenZ and Millennials users, it is definitely an interesting channel to promote brands to a targeted audience.

Initially, it was very popular and successful in China, Japan, Cambogia, Malaysia, Singapore Thailand and Indonesia. Now the platform is growing exponentially, in particular in Europe, and counting a large number of active users worldwide.

Just o figure out, Instagram took six years from its launch to gain the same amount of monthly active users that TikTok managed to achieve in under three years. And for Facebook to hit the same monthly active users mark, it took nearly over four years. 

#story Douyin, known as TikTok internationally, is an online short-video mobile application that allows users to create, post, and share self-created videos.

Launched by ByteDance in September 2016, it is now one of the leading social network apps by number of downloads as well as active users

TikTok is one of the fastest growing social media platform in the world which presents an alternative version of online sharing. It allows users to create short videos with music, filters, and some other features. And while for many people TikTok provides a platform for users to express themselves in a very creative way, that is why GenZ are enthusiast users. The acquisition of Musical.ly gave Tiktok the possibility to target directly US teenagers.

Did you know it ? TikTok and Douyin both use the same software, but maintain separate networks in order to comply with Chinese censorship restrictions.

Why it is so appealing? With 500 Million of active users worldwide (of which 150 Million are only in China), it is a very successful social network. In India, there are more than 20 million active users of the app.

The usage of the app is very simple and everyone is enabled to be a content creator. It matches lifestyle, freedom of expression through creativity(singing, dancing, acting) and entertainment with a community dimension.Users often participate in “challenges” or create “duets”, i.e. videos with split screens built on existing content.

Some other curious facts:

• 41% of Tiktok users globally are aged between 16 and 24 years old (source Globalwebindex, 2019). Douyin is designed for young audience with a focus on Generation Z. With a customized background music, users can create a 15-second video with unique effects and share it with friends or the broader audience out in the world. It is also very popular to do lip sync along different music with the app.
• By December 2018, Douyin has a MAU* of 426 million in China (QuestMobile, 2019).
• 90% of them access the app daily
• More than 1 Million videos viewed everyday in a year on average on TikTok (source Influencermarketinghub, 2018)
• App analytics site Sensor Tower reported that TikTok has been downloaded in total 1.5 billion times since its release and, it reached 614 million downloads in 2019. India accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. 
• It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming in 2019. Numbers one and two are WhatsApp and Messenger, while four and five are the Facebook app and Instagram.
• In February 2019, TikTok was hit with a record fine by the US Federal Trade Commission for collecting data on children under the age of 13. The fine related to Musical.ly, a video-sharing app Bytedance bought in 2017 and merged with TikTok. In China, the company has paid fines for pornographic content and fraudulent ads. In India, TikTok was pulled from app stores in April over claims it made children vulnerable to pornographic and other inappropriate content. The ban was lifted after two weeks, after ByteDance successfully appealed the court ruling. Before the ban, TikTok app downloads reached 250 million, in India. In Indonesia, the government blocked access to the app in early July 2018, claiming that it featured pornographic and blasphemous content. TikTok censorship is an hybrid of AI filtering and human monitoring, in which thousands of employees monitor videos with AI-based tools. This solution has gone global, as the firm has established local content monitoring units in other countries, including Indonesia where a staff of 20 now filters videos based on local regulations and cultural values.
• Recently, TikTok has admitted censoring posts by users it identified as disabled, fat or LGBTQ+ as part of a misguided effort to cut down on bullying on the platform.
• To preserve its users base, Instagram started testing a new feature called Reels with its Brazilian users in November 2019, which was widely perceived as a TikTok clone.

AI and machine learning

TikTok’s main objective is to keep users on the app as long as possible, so they focus heavily on showing the right videos to the right users. 

How it works: With the employment of AI technology, TikTok could analyze user’s reaction and interaction of past content. The technology will study if users taped the keywords, if they liked it, or even the length of time they spend each video. The app would thereby generate individualized feeds of contents through the machine learning algorithm and deliver them to the corresponding end users. Every time users open or refresh the app, new feeds would be automatically pushed, loaded, and displayed without them actively searching for contents. These contents recommended to the users in the end are thought to be of their interests, habits, and preferences.

Video classification is defined by two key characteristics:

1. The music / audio
2. The text description / hashtags

The users’ preference is determined by tracking their actions on previously seen videos:

1. Likes
2. Shares
3. Comments
4. Percentage Watched: The more the user watched, the higher it is; also known as completion ratio which is referred to the percentage of the video watched.

In this way, TikTok relies on AI technology in two ways. First, on the consumer side, its algorithms quickly learn individual preferences, as they capture not only the users’ “likes” and comments, but how long they actually watch each video. As the clips are very short, TikTok’s algorithms quickly build sizeable datasets.

Secondly, on the producer side, AI also helps content creators craft viral videos. It simplifies video editing and suggests music, hashtags, filters and other enhancements that are trending or have been proven popular based on the category.

ByteDance, the parent company, has been founded by Yiming Zhang in March 2012.

In 2017, ByteDance acquired short video apps Flipgram and musical.ly and has been expanding its international presence ever since. Up until the end of 2018. Douyin is available in over 155 countries and regions, in more than 75 languages. ByteDance is now one of the most valuable unicorn in the world, established its own artificial intelligence (AI) lab that focuses on utilizing machine learning and deep learning into its products and services (it has more than a dozen apps including news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, Xigua Video known as Top Buzz Video platform outside China, Huoshan, known as Vigo Video and selfie app FaceU.).

*MAU means the proportion of monthly users who use the product on a daily basis – or user affection

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