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TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

bbc.com

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Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#121

Post by justicezyx »

belval wrote: post #29

I hate TikTok because it's so good. It's a frictionless content pump that we can open and doom-scroll for hours. I have never seen such a beautifully crafted user experience, from the recommendation algorithm that is top-notch the content that is catchy and highlights trends without overdoing it and the absence of political content if you don't engage with it (or maybe there is none at all). I don't have it on my pho…

You are misled by the title...

ByteDance's overwhelming revenue is from non-TikTok sources, i.e., all JinRiTouTIao, DouYin, and other minor properties. The title wants you to think it related to TikTok as it was one of the most controversial news pieces in 2020.

TikTok's financial success is still very uncertain.

ByteDance is facing a weak BIDU (note Alibaba do not have much Ads business, and Tencent has a different walled garden), while here they are facing FB & Google in US.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#122

Post by lotsofpulp »

DevKoala wrote: post #111

TikTok is genius. I don’t have it installed, but whenever someone links me to it, it is hard to not continue looking at other related clips. I don’t see Facebook ever building something as cool.

I must be getting old because when my younger sibling links me to it, it always falls short of delivering. Usually some amateur trying to be funny by over exaggerating something, but not something I have not already seen.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#123

Post by ska »

dntrkv wrote: post #112
rapsey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok removes or makes it much harder to find content they do not want on the platform. Things that are not the right tone. There is very little political and culture war crap on it. They don't just censor for abusive, CP, spam and so on.

> There is very little political and culture war crap on it That all depends on what kind of content you engage with. There is plenty of "political and culture war" type content on TikTok. You probably just don't see it.

Both could be true - i.e. that there is that sort of content there and you will find it if you engage with that stuff ... and that there is notably less of it that on other services.

Any individuals exposure to one of these large networks is a tiny, tiny fraction of what is there.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#124

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

justicezyx wrote: post #121
belval wrote: post #29

I hate TikTok because it's so good. It's a frictionless content pump that we can open and doom-scroll for hours. I have never seen such a beautifully crafted user experience, from the recommendation algorithm that is top-notch the content that is catchy and highlights trends without overdoing it and the absence of political content if you don't engage with it (or maybe there is none at all). I don't have it on my pho…

You are misled by the title... ByteDance's overwhelming revenue is from non-TikTok sources, i.e., all JinRiTouTIao, DouYin, and other minor properties. The title wants you to think it related to TikTok as it was one of the most controversial news pieces in 2020. TikTok's financial success is still very uncertain. ByteDance is facing a weak BIDU (note Alibaba do not have much Ads business, and Tencent has a different…

> TikTok's financial success is still very uncertain.

I would take that bet any day of the week and twice on Fridays. TikTok has a massive, growing user base with engaging content on a platform that people generally like. I find it hard to believe they would succeed so massively in their app design and recommendation algorithms and then fail at monetization, which at this point is the trivial part.

I don't know what BIDU means.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#125

Post by stevofolife »

anthony_romeo wrote: post #91
belval wrote: post #29

I hate TikTok because it's so good. It's a frictionless content pump that we can open and doom-scroll for hours. I have never seen such a beautifully crafted user experience, from the recommendation algorithm that is top-notch the content that is catchy and highlights trends without overdoing it and the absence of political content if you don't engage with it (or maybe there is none at all). I don't have it on my pho…

IMO I find the platform to be mentally abusive for me. It's a whirlwind of stirring emotions, shocking content, and 'earworms' everywhere, where memes iteratively compound into their own nonsensical language at a faster rate than on other networks. I'm afraid of observing, say, misconceptions and false math tricks passively on the platform, and accidentally letting them burrow into my brain. There isn't enough time f…

You got it all wrong. You don't use TikTok for critical thinking. This product was never designed to be a critical thinking tool.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#126

Post by star-trek-fleet »

ericls wrote: post #73
zffr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy? I would push back on that. TikTok has built a great app, a community of creators, an audience to consume content, and relationships with advertisers to generate revenue. They have made careful design decisions to engineer how addictive it is. This is hard work, and few companies can pull it off.

Do you know how they got started?

He has no idea probably.

ByteDance's founder is an engineer, who happened to notice the fact that automation should come into content distribution in addition to all other aspects of social and economic activities.

So he started JinRiTouTiao, pretty much a DouYin/TikTok applied to text news. The narattive is this to give an analog. The fact is that DouYin/TikTok followed JinRiTouTIao's model.

TouTIao's content, like DouYin/TikTok, are manufactured to catch the attention. With attractive/provoking/(or whatever encourages clicking) titles, like the filtered/enhanced cover photo of any DouYin/TikTok video. The content is largely nonsensical, usually a rehash of some well-known old news. Just like DouYin/TikTok, just nonsensical videos to give you some short-term surge of satisfaction. The ads are mixed together with the manufactured content, which also has the same attractive title and content. Just like DouYin/TikTok.

The thing is that ByteDance, as a new generation of Internet company, becomes more fragile than any of its predecessors. In the sense that most of key factors of its success are based on machines, which are much easier to copy than things invovled more human activities (for example, it's easy to copy a successful anime, to make it successful, but it's much harder to copy the idea of a motion picture with actors and make it successful).

You can imagine someday, another startup, happen to invented a new AI that can generate content, whoola, ByteDance would be crumbling. If the founder would be as convicted as Mark Zuckberg, ByteDance would be killed in a few years...

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#127

Post by Barrin92 »

an_opabinia wrote: post #105
IncRnd wrote: post #55

The headline uses the word "earnings" incorrectly. > "ByteDance also saw its annual gross profit rise by 93% to to $19bn, while it recorded a net loss of $45bn for the same period."

How did ByteDance lose $45b…

that too is answered in the article

"The net loss was attributed to a one-off accounting adjustment and not related to the company's operations."

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#128

Post by justicezyx »

Spivak wrote: post #31

Honestly, good for them. TikTok is such a breath of fresh air in the social media space -- it's bursting with raw unfiltered creativity, interactions are really genuine and I've actually met now IRL friends on TikTok. Their recommendation engine is scary good at discovery which solves the "I don't know who to follow" problem, the ads are the least intrusive of any social media platform. If you don't "get" TikTok beca…

> raw unfiltered creativity

LMAO

Those videos are literally produced by color or facial enhancement *filters*...

Not to mention the content moderation and censorship...

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#129

Post by netr0ute »

sjg007 wrote: post #114
rapsey wrote: post #3

TikTok is a social network that could not be made by an American company, due to its complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship. This is a major part of its success, due to not allowing its network to deteriorate into culture wars and general unpleasant behaviour. I suspect any future social network much like TikTok will have exclusion as a major feature.

American companies can censor, they do it all the time. Free speech is protection of speech from prosecution by the government, not corporations.

If companies replace roles of the government, then this limitation no longer applies.

Re: TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020

#130

Post by Barrin92 »

Spivak wrote: post #31

Honestly, good for them. TikTok is such a breath of fresh air in the social media space -- it's bursting with raw unfiltered creativity, interactions are really genuine and I've actually met now IRL friends on TikTok. Their recommendation engine is scary good at discovery which solves the "I don't know who to follow" problem, the ads are the least intrusive of any social media platform. If you don't "get" TikTok beca…

it also has really out there content. I didn't expect much because I don't care much for pop culture but I found a crew of a ship who seemed to ferry stuff around the Caspian Sea and they pretty much documented most of their trip on tiktok. That was a surprise to me.
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