Is ByteDance set to become China’s most valuable internet company? | WARC | The Feed
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Is ByteDance set to become China’s most valuable internet company?
TikTok owner ByteDance is growing at a staggering rate and with no sign of slowing down as it battles rivals for dominance in multiple areas; some now see it as heading for the top spot in China’s digital realm.
The background
Created in a Beijing apartment just nine years ago, ByteDance is now one of the world’s most valuable start-ups, worth around $400bn, according to the South China Morning Post, which details some of the tech giants it is taking on:
- Social media and gaming: Tencent
- Local services: Meituan
- E-commerce: Alibaba
- Video: Kuaishou
How it’s winning
- Key to success are ByteDance’s algorithms, which pull in ever-greater numbers of China’s mobile phone users.
- ByteDance’s big advantage is its huge reach – its short video sharing app, Douyin, has more than 600 million daily users alone.
- Content-driven advertising is for now the company’s biggest earner – last year earnings are believed to have more than doubled to around US$37bn. In China alone, ad revenue reportedly reached around $27.2bn in 2020.
Soundbite
“There’s only so many ways to make money online. The big markets – games, e-commerce, ads – are far from being winner-takes-all. Traffic is king, after all, and if there’s one thing ByteDance has in spades, it’s traffic” – Matthew Brennan, China tech analyst and author of ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’.
Sourced from South China Morning Post
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