Is Tik Tok very popular overseas? Deconstructing the successful experience of TikTok going global!

Few tech startups have grown as quickly as ByteDance. Its flagship product, the overseas version of TikTok, is currently a popular downloaded app in major app stores. In just two or three years, TikTok has appeared on a list of competitors such as Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat and Facebook, with more than 1 billion downloads in 150 markets and 75 languages ​​around the world.

Douyin, including its overseas version TikTok, ranked third in the global App Store and Google Play combined download list in the first quarter (the same ranking as in the fourth quarter of last year), second only to Facebook's WhatsApp and Messenger.

Image source: sensorTower

Product Strategy

ByteDance can succeed in the fiercely competitive international market because its flagship product, the TikTok APP, has two different versions for the domestic and international markets. In fact, it is the success of Douyin’s dual version strategy (one for the Chinese market and the other for the rest of the world), which can help ByteDance achieve a new model of digital content marketing on an international scale. When TikTok opens up overseas markets, it may also provide some successful experiences that can be used as reference for other companies waiting to go overseas or companies that are already going overseas.

Image source: Internet

From the beginning, Zhang Yiming was an engineer at Microsoft, but since he founded ByteDance, his goal has been to run a borderless company. Zhang Yiming, 36, is one of a new generation of homegrown Chinese technology leaders with an international outlook, inspired by the early success of Chinese tech pioneers in the late 1990s such as Baidu's Robin Li, Alibaba's Jack Ma and Tencent's Pony Ma.

ByteDance is currently valued at $78 billion and is one of China's 86 "unicorns" in 2018.

Top venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital China, Japan's SoftBank Group, US private equity investor KKR, Chinese investment firm Hillhouse Capital and SIG Asia Ventures have all raised funds for ByteDance. Although ByteDance has obtained capital financing from home and abroad, it has quickly entered the ranks of Internet unicorns. However, in the process of going global, ByteDance may encounter more and more distrust and scrutiny on the overseas market, especially in terms of security issues. Just like what happened to domestic communications giant Huawei, Huawei faces a lot of scrutiny and distrust from Western countries in the process of promoting its 5G technology to the international market. Therefore, this will also be a problem that domestic companies need to face when going overseas, especially those that excel in technology.

In August 2012, five months after the founding of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming launched his first application product - Toutiao. In 2016, the launch of the short video app Douyin enriched Toutiao's product lineup.

Overseas journey

In 2017, the overseas version of Douyin was named "TikTok" and launched into the international market. In the same year, ByteDance spent approximately US$900 million to acquire Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based social video application with more than 200 million users worldwide. Data shows that more than 90% of Musical.ly users are young people under the age of 21, with a global MAU of more than 70 million, a DAU of nearly 20 million, and a North American DAU of more than 6 million. As a star company in North America, Musical.ly has long been at the top of the North American APP application rankings. After successfully acquiring Musical.ly, ByteDance combined Douyin's AI data stream with Musical.ly's product innovation, which was well adapted to the tastes and preferences of mainstream Western users and laid a solid foundation for TikTok's successful overseas expansion.

After ByteDance merged Musical.ly, which had been established for four years, into Douyin, the integrated TikTok gained about 30 million new users from major app stores within three months. The app makes money through advertising and by selling virtual goods such as emojis and stickers to fans. The app’s success has been driven by an easy-to-use interface, news and entertainment content combined with a powerful AI algorithm that can precisely match users rather than recommending content based on their viewing habits and “likes”.

Connie Chan, a venture capital partner at Andreessen Horowitz in San Francisco, wrote in her blog that at Bytedance, where AI-powered precision feeds are not yet common in the West, TikTok uses the app’s AI algorithms to decide which videos to show users, learning their preferences as they use it more. She pointed out that this is different from Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and YouTube, which use AI to recommend posts instead of sending information streams directly to users, which is also TikTok's unique advantage.

In the past few years, Bytedance acquired Los Angeles-based Flipagram and invested $50 million in Live.me. In addition, ByteDance also acquired France's global mobile news aggregation service News Republic from Cheetah Mobile for US$86.6 million. ByteDance unsuccessfully attempted to buy a major stake in US social news aggregator Reddit from Si Newhouse’s Advance Publications.

Competition and Opportunities

Facebook has already felt a strong threat from its Chinese rival ByteDance. SensorTower data shows that in 2018, TikTok ranked fourth in the world in non-game apps downloaded, second only to Facebook and its related apps WhatsApp and Messenger, with 711 million and 611 million, respectively. It is important to note that TikTok’s success in the Indian market is an important reason for its opening up of overseas markets. About a quarter of TikTok’s downloads come from India. TikTok added 188 million downloads in the first quarter of 2019, surpassing Facebook's 176 million but trailing only WhatsApp's 224 million and Messenger's 209 million. To date, TikTok has been installed a total of 1.4 billion times outside of China.

Image source: sensorTower

In late 2018, Facebook launched its own short-video product, Lasso, which was widely considered a knockoff of TikTok. Aimed at teens, Lasso is only accessible through Facebook or Instagram, and so far is limited to the United States. According to data from app analytics firm SensorTower, 70,000 U.S. users downloaded Lasso within four months of its launch in November, while TikTok has nearly 40 million users in the same period.

Risks and prohibitions

The rise of TikTok has also brought with it a host of regulatory issues. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok $5.7 million for failing to obtain parental consent before collecting names, email addresses and personal information about child users under 13 years old. In India, lawmakers briefly banned the app from download on Apple and Android in April for encouraging "cultural degradation" among young people. The ban was lifted a few weeks later when Bytedance’s lawyers successfully argued that the system screened objectionable content and prevented videos showing nudity, and is being continuously upgraded to identify problematic videos and make more personalized content recommendations.

Image source: Internet

Despite regulatory and other challenges, ByteDance is building an empire for a new generation of apps and challenging traditional digital content. If ByteDance can continue to deliver on its mission to become a borderless company, this will lead and influence other technology innovators in emerging markets to take the same risk. Ultimately, such behavior will subvert the global Internet industry.

Author: DotCUnitedGroup

Source: DotCUnitedGroup