The company’s main app inside China is the news aggregator Jinri Toutiao (‘Today’s Headlines’) and it has already significantly disrupted the news business there. Similar, seemingly inane Western apps like Snapchat have already branched out to news publishing and certainly ByteDance will be looking to do the same.Īfter all, news is a core competency for ByteDance. There are already signs that the suite of mini-programs in the TikTok app is going to expand. What we don’t know is where they’ll pirouette to next. Unlike China’s first generation of social media tech giants who stumbled in their international expansion, second-generation upstarts like ByteDance are proving to be much more sure-footed. We may be most familiar with Silicon Valley’s tech behemoths like Facebook and Google, but there’s a fresh blessing of Chinese unicorns galloping our way. The speedy rise of TikTok should serve as a wake-up call to regulators. They have already been scouting the local market for content creators and, according to market research group Forrester, the company is already pulling in anywhere from $3.7 million to $12.9 million in Australia. To be sure, TikTok is still very much a B player in Australia and-at the moment at least-is only a video-sharing app for tweens that you, as a reader of The Strategist, have probably never heard of (which, by the way, is completely by design).īut ByteDance executives are reportedly considering opening an Australian office. Tencent-operated WeChat gets a paragraph, but with no analysis-despite being used by over a million Australians and having a trail of problematic stories behind it. The overnight success of TikTok should serve as a reminder to the ACCC that, as journalism professor Margaret Simons flagged in her submission to the inquiry, regulators ‘should not assume that Western digital platforms will be the only ones to gain a foothold in Australia’.ĭespite the warning, TikTok gets just a single mention in the report-and only because Facebook listed it as one of its many competitors in an answer to the inquiry.
Then, just over a week before ACCC Chairman Rod Sims handed the finished report to Treasurer Josh Frydenburg, ByteDance announced at the Shanghai Film Festival that it had amassed more than one billion active users across its family of apps. With no serious regulatory barriers-let alone a Great American Firewall-to stop it, TikTok achieved its meteoric growth, ironically enough, by ploughing US$1 billion into ads on the social platforms of its Western rivals like Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram, and Snapchat.Īs the ACCC scribes reached the halfway point of their report, Beijing-based ByteDance-the company behind TikTok-became the world’s most valuable start-up on the planet after securing a US$3 billion investment round which gave it a jaw-dropping valuation of US$75 billion. In the 18 months the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was busily working away on its 623-page opus on digital platforms, Chinese-owned app upstart TikTok grew a global audience of over 700 million.
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