ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant behind social media platform TikTok, has begun to see its growth slow — per a new report from The Information.
Your slow is my fast
Although best known in the western world for TikTok, more than 80% of ByteDance’s revenue comes from its domestic operations in China, thanks in part to its flagship video-sharing app Douyin. That revenue “only” grew 25% in the last year, according to people familiar with the company’s results.
In tech-land, everything is relative, and ByteDance’s growth rate remains remarkable, with total revenue for the group reaching a staggering $85bn in 2022. For a company in its 10th year of operations, that number is unprecedented. At a similar stage, Facebook (now Meta) had racked up just one-tenth of that amount, in fact it took the world’s largest social media company ~17 years to reach revenues of $85bn.
Ladders and snakes
Clearly it’s easier to grow quickly when following in the footsteps of giants, rather than forging the path for yourself. Convincing advertisers to part with their fiercely protected marketing budgets to buy ads on a social networking site was probably a lot more difficult in 2007 than it is in 2023.
Furthermore, TikTok has — somewhat ironically — been able to advertise itself on the other platforms. Spending at least hundreds of millions on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social apps, ByteDance's total sales and marketing bill came to a whopping $19.2bn last year.
