Bytedance, TikTok, Musical.ly, and Zhang Yiming
A fascinating in-depth look at Zhang Yiming and Bytedance, from culture to specific decisions.
Inspired from the Excerpts of Wisdom format, here is a post highlighting quotes I found interesting from this Weixin post by Zhang Jun about Zhang Yiming and Bytedance, titled TikTok Insider: Zhang Yiming's Journey of Giant Waves. It is rare to be able to read such detailed histories that engage personalities and decisions in a detailed and vibrant manner about American companies let alone Chinese firms. Bytedance and TikTok intersect with many fascinating topics: domestic competitors, working culture, and the China-US relationship, and this piece provides a novel perspective. I heavily encourage you to read the piece in its entirety and follow Zhang Jun for her other work.
“Zhang Yiming doesn't seem to set up a mental restraint for himself. "Yiming thinks that challenging Facebook and Google is something that should be done," another person in charge of a certain overseas region told me. "For him, it is to stand firm and then kick the giants down."'
“A person familiar with Musical.ly told me that they wanted to find an adverb to express their attitude towards life. "ly" was inspired by the initials of "Lu Yu" pinyin , and hoped to express: "live music.ly". But the music domain name has been registered, and we chose music as a compromise. More incidentally, ".ly" is the national domain name of Libya, which happened to be the Libyan war that year, and was sold at a particularly cheap price.”
“A key person who experienced the start of TikTok told me that the team took many English names and did A/B tests, but nothing was finalized. They nearly kicked TikTok out of the plethora of cool English words. TikTok is the title of a European and American pop song released in 2009. The pronunciation is taken from tick tock (tick), which describes the ultimate nightclub carnival. What makes people hesitant is that although this song is popular, it is very similar to a slobber song, which is vulgar in American culture. It has one of the few advantages: good pronunciation. Of course, the choice of name was mixed with chance. Byte changed its strategy at the beginning of the internationalization of short videos, focusing on Japan and South Korea. In these two countries, TikTok is not only catchy, but also a bit playful.”
“Zuckerberg is interested in capturing the teenage market. In his opinion, Musical.ly is "Instagram for video". Zuckerberg sent Instagram founder Kevin Strom to visit Shanghai many times to discuss acquisitions with the Musical.ly core team. People involved in the deal told me that Systrom made at least three trips to Shanghai in person, and in the end, Facebook made a verbal offer of $1.6 billion in pure cash. But at the end of the negotiations, Facebook became hesitant because it wasn't sure how high the ceiling for short videos was.”
“They opted for a differentiation strategy -- "play around North America" -- with a focus on Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, India and Brazil. Among them, East Asia is the dominant area of TikTok. However, none of these regions are as important as the United States. For content products, the United States is a highland, and "whoever wins the United States wins the world." A TikTok start-up said that Musical.ly is too important for Byte’s short video strategy or globalization strategy, and “must be bought.”’
“After the integration, TikTok entered a frenzy of throwing money, throwing money, and throwing money crazy. Their most important distribution channel is of course their old enemy Facebook. "From the third and fourth quarters of 2018 to the first quarter of 2019, TikTok's promotion budget increased by more than 100% every quarter," a person close to Facebook told me, "Facebook's annual revenue in Greater China is about 5 billion US dollars. TikTok planned to contribute about $1 billion over three years.”’
“The reason for Facebook to relax its guard is simple: TikTok's retention rate is so poor. "Is this company stupid? The users who bought it basically ran away, and the retention rate the next day was 30%. The internal view of Facebook is: I direct traffic to it, it can't retain users anyway, and it does not pose any threat." The above people said. At the beginning of 2019, Liu Zhen, the senior vice president of ByteDance in charge of the international functional department at that time, made a special trip to bring the team to Facebook and signed an annual strategic cooperation agreement with its senior management in Greater China.”
“When he took over, TikTok's Chinese and foreign employees were filled with antagonistic emotions, and Zhu Jun proposed the mission, vision and values. The employee said: "Alex builds a poetic expression." "Foreigners especially buy in." Alex said this: "TikTok is a commerce (commerce), a bridge (bridge), and a window (windows)."‘
“Sure enough, all departments have assessed that there is a loss - removing the Facebook interface will lead to the lack of accurate portraits when acquiring users, affecting growth and monetization efficiency. Zhu Jun asked everyone to further clarify the loss of user experience. The team collectively came to a conclusion, no more than 20%. Zhu Jun conveyed the order: cut off immediately.”
“Like Iraq, TikTok has never spent a penny. However, during the epidemic, TikTok surged to 6 million daily users, and the mobile Internet population in Iraq was about 25 million, with a daily penetration rate of 24% and a monthly penetration rate of 40%.”
“Globalization has squeezed Chinese jobs. The huge "localization" has caused a Chinese citizen to have three choices if he wants to be on the big ship of byte internationalization. One is to change the permanent residence to Singapore, Los Angeles, etc., so that local data can be accessed; the other is to get a US green card and access local data through VPN, but there are restrictions on permissions; the third is to move from the core departments that contact data to areas that do not have to rely on data. , relatively away from the decision center.”
“After watching the movie, Zhang Yiming opened the Douban app and made a short comment: "The most impressive word in "The Social Network" is paranoia." He gave the movie a four-star recommendation.”
“Just as Zhang Yiming led TikTok to go against the tide, in this world, if you are not swallowed by desire, maybe you can swallow desire in one bite.”
Admittedly, that was a lot of blurbs. However, that barely covers the surface of what TikTok Insider: Zhang Yiming's Journey of Giant Waves does, and in far greater detail behind major figures and decisions. Hopefully this piece will not only encourage greater curiosity and reading of non-English sources for Chinese topics, but also many others in the intersection of personality, technology, and visions of the future.