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.
