Hans Tung is a managing partner at GGV Capital. For more on ByteDance, listen to their interview with Liu Zhen, senior vice president of ByteDance and former head of Uber China , on the. This post contains multiple videos and is best viewed on mobile with sound on. What is the most popular app in China? It is owned by ByteDance a. ByteDance is a GGV portfolio company. Douyin is one of the few apps that has enjoyed wild popularity both inside and outside of China. This is remarkable growth for an app that is less than two years old. In addition to its flagship news product Toutiao, ByteDance also own numerous other short video apps as shown in the graphic below. Last November, ByteDance merged with Musical. Hans Tung, managing partner at GGV Capital, facilitated the merger. For more on this merger, read or watch. Once you open the app, a video starts playing immediately. You scroll through a bottomless feed of 15-second videos—just like how you scroll through pictures on Instagram. And because it is mobile only and the content is so bite-sized, people consume it everywhere—on the train, on the street, in bed, at work. The average user spends 20. The most popular types of content on Douyin are: dance, comedy, babies, life hacks, food, pets, pranks, and stunts see the last section of this article for links to Douyin videos that are representative of each genre. Recently, Tencent has blocked links to videos on Douyin as well as several other short video apps on WeChat and QQ. Tencent says its move is motivated by regulatory reasons, but many Chinese media outlets have commented that Tencent did so because it feels threatened by ByteDance as a formidable competitor. Tencent is , claiming defamation, while ByteDance has for anti-competitive behavior and is requesting RMB 1 million in damages. The CEOs of the two companies, Pony Ma and Zhang Yiming, recently had. It actively helps promote them by subsidizing their traffic. Its stated goal is to help create 1,000 influencers with over a million followers in the coming year. Douyin understood that its early adopters could determine the entire trajectory of the product. Douyin also actively works with MCN multi-channel network organizations, agencies in China that specialize in propelling ordinary people to Internet stardom. She once gained 10 million followers on Douyin within a 30-day span. She is a client of Yang Cong, a top MCN organization in China that counts several dozen Douyin influencers in its network. Watch a video by Dai Gu La K: Lesson 2: Unleash the creativity of ordinary people Many viral videos on Douyin are not created by celebrities, but ordinary people who did something really creative or impressive. The videos went viral and thousands recorded their own version. Inspired by the Hai Di Lao phenomenon, some restaurants have started to offer customers discounts if they record Douyin videos featuring their food. Lesson 3: Topic marketing — give people something to make videos about Douyin regularly launches hashtags that serve as trending topics or themes on the platform. Hundreds of thousands of people participate in making videos on the same theme. By partnering with influencers on Douyin, brands can instantly reach millions of followers with the hashtag challenges and turn these users into their marketers. Below is a screenshot of the camera view. Lesson 5: Turn the comment section into a social hub Some people say the only reason they use Douyin is to see its comment section, which has become a social hub where users interact. Lesson 6: Personalized recommendation is key ByteDance calls itself an AI company, complete with thousands of engineers and its own led by former executives at Microsoft Research Asia. Its core competency is making use of machine learning and algorithms to determine what kind of content would appeal to particular users based on their past viewing behavior. Lesson 7: Where there is content, there is commerce Douyin allows creators to embed product links into their videos, lending to a seamless transition from content to commerce. Lesson 8: Take it global A year after Douyin was launched in China, its English version, Tik Tok, was launched in multiple international markets and quickly rose to the top of the App Store in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea. Although its product interface is similar to the Chinese version, Tik Tok has also been localized organically by users in these markets, who integrated local music and culture into their short videos. For example, face painting seems to be a popular genre in Indonesia, and K-pop videos go viral in South Korea. Having an international product also enable viral effects to spread globally. The cute video, hashtagged iamyourvalentine, earned him over 680,000 likes on Tik Tok within a week and became a worldwide phenomenon as thousands recorded their own rendition of the video. Here are some popular Tik Tok videos in,, and. Note: Douyin can only be downloaded on the Chinese app store. If you would like to use the app outside of China, you must download Tik Tok or Musical. In order to allow readers outside of China to get a taste of videos on Douyin, here are several popular Douyin videos to YouTube, each typical of a genre.
