2 charts for you today:
We don't usually get much of a look inside ByteDance — the private parent company of red-hot social media app TikTok. However, this week ByteDance revealed that its revenue last year had leapt up to more than $34bn.
ByteDance owns TikTok, which is known as Douyin in China, as well as Toutiao (which is a Chinese news platform), and has had a phenomenal rise to become the most valuable start-up in the world.
Social giant speed run
Although its $34bn of revenue is some way off the $86bn that social media giant Facebook pulled in last year, it's a truly insane number when you consider that ByteDance was only founded in 2012. That makes 2020 its eighth ever full year of results. At that age Facebook, which was famously founded in Zuckerberg's Harvard dormitory in 2004, was pulling in just over $5bn. Even accounting for some inflation, ByteDance is growing at an unbelievable rate.
Apart from just having some of the most addictive content and sharing mechanics of any social media app, TikTok has — somewhat ironically — been able to advertise itself on other giant platforms. That has meant spending literally millions — and probably billions — on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social apps in the hope that people install TikTok and then forget to go on those other apps.
Facebook would probably love to have not allowed TikTok to advertise, but with Congress looking for any whiff of anti-competitive behaviour to reprimand big tech over, that probably wouldn't be a good look.
This week British bicycle retailer Halfords warned that it expected the "global bike shortage" to continue, as the surge in demand for bikes during the pandemic has lingered into the end of 2020 and the start of 2021.
The bike boom is an example of a hobby that exploded during the pandemic — and has actually had some staying power. Google searches for "bike for sale" have come down from their pandemic peak, but are still higher in 2021 than they ever were in 2019.
Yoga is another activity that has maintained at least some of the momentum, as have searches for home workout routines, which again are (only slightly) higher in 2021 than they were in 2019. But of all of the pandemic hobbies, few have replicated what has happened to chess. Searches for online chess got a double boost, first from the pandemic, and then from the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit — which has fuelled a second boom in the ancient game.
Chess, yoga, bike rides and home workouts may have retained varying amounts of their pandemic bump — but the same can't be said for some of the other pandemic fads such as breadmaking and puzzling. Searches for both appear to have returned to levels seen in 2019. Banana bread's 15 minutes of fame is officially over.
1) Joe Biden has signed the bill that establishes June 19th as Juneteenth National Independence Day, officially commemorating the end of slavery in the United States with what will become the 11th federal holiday.
2) A 1,098 carat diamond has been found in Botswana —making it the third-largest gem quality diamond ever found.
3) OnlyFans, the content subscription service popular with erotic content creators, is exploring a sale of new shares at a valuation of reportedly north of $1bn.
4) Data from some of the largest cities in the US reveals that killers are almost as likely to go free as they are to be caught — with the ratio of arrests-to-murders falling in recent years.
5) There's a reason over 3 million people start their day with Morning Brew — the daily email that sums up the latest news from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.**
6) Dos Hombres, the mezcal brand started by Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, has become the latest celebrity-founded brand of alcohol to get investment from a major firm.
**This is a sponsored snack.
