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It certainly grew fast, no question. It's not a behemoth however. It has 1/5th the sales of CBS, which is just one of dozens of big US media companies. It's very unlikely they'll be able to invade the US in a meaningful sense. Toutiao's primary business is media content aggregation. They're going to be incapable of presenting non-censored news, content, media. The CPC will require that anything they allow in their pu…
But it would be interesting to see how they use musical.ly. Toutiao has AI capabilities and I think they want to make use of the lip-syncing ability.
I would expect one of these companies will want to attempt what Sony did and accumulate a music business. The question will be how they can manage to align that with the media restrictions they have to live within. Maybe Toutiao is young enough to still dare to attempt it, I think the older, larger Chinese Internet companies long ago learned to avoid challenging the CPC's boundaries.
In a less restricted atmosphere, companies like Snapchat or Twitter would be prime take-over targets for some of the Chinese giants looking for international expansion. I think a company like Tencent might have acquired Twitter by now if they could operate the platform without censorship trouble.