Forbes Asia - June 2018

14 | FORBES ASIA JUNE 2018

A

thena Yang learned about Douyin from her boy-

friend and soon became hooked. he 29-year-

old, who works at an investment irm in Beijing,

now spends her lunch break and evening watch-

ing music videos on the app, where people post

15-second clips of themselves—dancing, singing or even apply-

ing makeup. “here is a lot of funny and creative stuf on Dou-

yin,” Yang inds. “It is really relaxing and helps to relieve stress

at work.”

Developed by Beijing ByteDance Technology, Douyin, also

known as Tik Tok, has taken China’s younger generation by

storm. Similar to the popular music app Musical.ly, which Byte-

Dance acquired for $1 billion last year, it allows users to make,

edit and broadcast short video clips to their favorite songs,

while using an algorithm to promote them in individually tai-

lored feeds. Now Douyin’s explosive popularity is giving Byte-

Dance—a $20 billion startup also known for the Toutiao news

app—an edge as it contends with Tencent to become China’s

media and entertainment powerhouse. Yet the irm is facing

YouTube-like challenges: Some of Douyin’s clips are drawing

scrutiny and a backlash online for inappropriate and potential-

ly dangerous content, adding to the regulatory grief ByteDance

already faces.

Douyin’s recent success comes from its content production

mechanism. As with most short-video platforms in China, it re-

lies on clips made by both professionals and amateurs to attract

eyeballs. But ByteDance does it better than local peers: Dou yin

regularly invites social media stars to participate in company-

hosted online video contests, where they challenge each other

or ask followers to broadcast clips to a certain theme. his has

given rise to viral online trends that upped the app’s popularity.

For example, some 70,000 app users once raced to make hu-

morous moves to the song “Seaweed Dance” by Chinese art-

ist Xiao Quan—a craze that inspired countless internet memes

and oine dancing contests across China. Douyin selects the

most popular moves to put in personalized feeds. And some

online stars, such as 25-year-old music producer Zhou Yue, tell

Forbes Asia they can earn millions of yuan a year by making

videos for Douyin. Advertisers like automobile companies and

gaming studios are paying to work with them on related pro-

motional songs that are shared across the site.

“Douyin has been producing better-quality content than

other short-video platforms in China,” says Chen Yuetian, a

partner at Chinese investment irm S. Capital. “Its clips are

more fashionable and attractive to young people.”

A year and half ater its launch, Douyin has attracted 166

million active users, the majority of them under 30, according

to Beijing consultancy Analysys International. hey spend an

average of 12.6 hours inside the app monthly—an engagement

level surpassing the 12.3 hours spent at Tencent-backed video-

sharing site Kuaishou, the irm’s data show. Meanwhile, Douyin

has been topping the downloading chart at the China iOS Store

for months, and it even became the most downloaded non-

game free app worldwide in the irst quarter this year—an ac-

FORBES ASIA

TENCENT TENSION

BYTEDANCE

TO THE MUSIC

The super-unicorn’s Douyin video site is cutting in on

WeChat’s hold on Chinese youth.

BY YUE WANG