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TikTok owner ByteDance sees its earnings double in 2020
- JackPoach 5y agoDid Oracle end up owning a part of the company or not?
- throwaway4good 5y agoNope. Some low-balled bids during the height of the Trump regime's maximum pressure campaign did not get them anywhere.
- throwaway4good 5y agoThough I still think ByteDance have the goal of an US IPO for TikTok International.
- rapsey 5y agoTikTok 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.
- vanattab 5y agoHow is tiktok more exclusive?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- topicseed 5y ago> I suspect any future social network much like TikTok will have exclusion as a major feature. Do you mean like Clubhouse?
- rapsey 5y agoExclusion by driving away users for being complete dog shit is not what I had in mind. Not a recipe for success. I guess I should have put "any future successful social network".
- reidjs 5y agoAnecdotally, clubhouse rooms were higher quality before they allowed Android users into the platform. Not saying that there's something inherently wrong with android users, there's just a higher noise to signal ratio now.
- topicseed 5y agoProbably because the first users were naturally more selected and targeted. Opening up to more people, regardless of their phone, inevitably leads to a noiser experience indeed.
- dncornholio 5y agoI tend to disagree, it's successful despite it's complete disregard for free speech and embrace of censorship. If the content is good enough people really don't care.
- rapsey 5y agoThe content is good because they surgically remove the bad.
- dncornholio 5y agoThen how do you explain the huge success of League of Legends and Valorant? They have some of the most intrusive anti-cheat in the planet, are Chinese based, and are HUGELY popular specifically in NA. Again, when the features are good enough, people really don't care.
- rapsey 5y agoSorry I have no idea what you mean
- draw_down 5y agoI’d say its success is due to how well it works to entertain the user. It understands how to understand what you like, and shows you videos in that vein. I don’t know how nor do I care. It’s simple and works well- we like those things, remember?
- ericls 5y agoIt’s also becoming a Chinese state owned company
- dartdartdart 5y agoYou know every company has to comply with regional laws: twitter got banned from that one African country, that doesn't mean twitter is against free speech. Tiktok has to comply with US laws to be able to enter the US market, and it also hires a bunch of US workers. Your sinophobia is not welcome on this website.
- rapsey 5y agoI have no idea what you are talking about or how it is sinophobia.
- jiofih 5y agoI think you’re not really grasping how much TikTok “curates” the content on the platform compared to everyone else. Having posts removed seems to be a very common occurrence - I’ve never had a single post of mine removed from any social platform in two decades.
- dilap 5y agoHuh? Major american social networks are highly censored. From the diversity of political opinions I see on TikTok, it certainly doesn't seem to be any more censored than say Twitter. (Exception: TikTok does not allow explicitly sexual content, whereas twitter does. But facebook and instagram don't.)
- rapsey 5y agoThey are not as censored as TikTok and they had to be strong armed into doing it.
- endisneigh 5y agothis is a strange comment. are US social media comments bound by free speech laws? don't they all remove content arbitrarily just like tiktok? how is this the top comment? lol. not to mention Vine was literally the same thing as tiktok - it had terrible execution and quickly died.
- rapsey 5y agoFacebook content moderation is not even remotely arbitrary.
- nemothekid 5y ago>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. Huh? Are you just going to ignore Vine? Twitter completely screwed the pooch on Vine by not paying creators which drove many high profile influencers to move to Instagram. To attribute TikTok’s success to censorship is to eagerly insert your own political bias into their story. Regardless TikTok, née Musica.ly had already started gaining steam as an American company without any major decision on whether to participate in culture wars
- rapsey 5y agoTikTok is un-american because of their complete disregard for free speech. Ehat you are talking about has nothing to so with what I said.
- dntrkv 5y ago> Twitter completely screwed the pooch on Vine All of the complaints about Google's shuttered apps pale in comparison to this one. Vine had the best community of any of the major apps, back then, and arguably even now. I understand they had trouble monitizing it, but it had a strong, vibrant community, even when they shut it down. If they hadn't neglected it for so long and iterated on the concept, they could have easily been TikTok today.
- xvector 5y agoCan you please source your claims? AFAIK TikTok ended censorship. You can even find vids with a lot of views talking about things like Tienamen Square, and I know friends whose FYPs are pretty political. It seems to me that you are confusing TikTok with Douyin (the Chinese version.) The thing is, TikTok's audience self-censors. People go on the app to feel good, not because they want to be dragged into another political debate or negativity-inducing spiral like with literally every other social media.
- rapsey 5y agoTikTok employs a lot of moderators and they go much farther than facebook or twitter by hiding or removing videos that are not upbeat or fun.
- xvector 5y agoI couldn't find a recent source for this. My understanding is that the audience of TikTok does not watch it for content that "is not upbeat or fun," effectively self-censoring the platform. People download TikTok specifically for the fun and upbeat content, so negative content naturally does not rise to the top (unless it is particularly comedic.)
- goatsi 5y agoHere's a source: https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-users-discrimination/ https://theintercept.com/2020/03/16/tiktok-app-moderators-us... Of course since the news has come out: >TikTok spokesperson Josh Gartner told The Intercept that “most of” the livestream guidelines reviewed by The Intercept “are either no longer in use, or in some cases appear to never have been in place,” but would not provide specifics. How far you believe them is up to you.
- admn2 5y agoWhile I wouldn't be surprised by this at all, I also think the algorithm is so good that it generally just blocks out content you don't interact with. It's always pretty obvious when the algo bubbles up a new topic completely outside of my normal feed, and when I linger, I'll start seeing more.
- paulpauper 5y agoDoesn't facebook, twitter, and other networks have a lot of censorship?
- marderfarker2 5y agoIronic since your ex POTUS got banned from your own social media on grounds of causing civil unrest.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoMore fun is still to come, when the audits come out.
- wise_young_man 5y agoCan this conspiracy stuff stop already? He lost and please move on. We are all tired of this.
- dukeofdoom 5y agoTrust but verify. 40% don't trust. More reason to verify.
- lorlou 5y agoWhat I love about tiktok is how they've managed to ban all political content. It's a social network which is fun precisely because it's not monopolised by rotten people with loads of free time.
- rapsey 5y agoMy point exactly.
- NathanKP 5y agoPolitical content isn't banned, it just doesn't perform well with the audience on TikTok, which is generally younger and mostly less interested in politics. Usually when I see political content it is from someone dueting the original content to troll it, and the troll outperforms the original. People try to get their political content trending on TikTok, but it seems like it usually just gets parodied and they basically get laughed off the platform.
- rapsey 5y agoIt is not just about audience. The political content is definitely de-emphasised and made harder to appear on peoples stream. It does not just happen by itself. It is moderated.
- NathanKP 5y agoI really don't think it is as human curated as you think. A lot of political content is very low effort. For example boring political rants that regurgitate the same tired old political lines that we've already heard a million times before. This stuff doesn't last long on For You page because it doesn't have people watching it loop multiple times, and it doesn't get likes, so the algorithm deemphasizes it. I have seen high effort political content hit the FYP page though and get millions of views. Like there is a guy who composes his own songs with a political theme and sings and dances them. That hits FYP all the time, because it is high effort and engaging, and people enjoy the tune and watch it loop a few times. High effort political content does succeed and does hit FYP, but it is rare to see because most people haven't figured out how to do it right for the TikTok audience. The kind of tired old outrage memes that make it on Twitter won't succeed on TikTok because they don't generate the same algorithmic signals.
- pjc50 5y ago> 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 nonsense. All the social networks have things they will remove and ban your account for, from spam and CP upwards (Instagram and FB being notoriously touchy about sexuality). It seems that TikTok is heavier about politics than most, but censorship is not a boolean.
- rapsey 5y agoTikTok 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.
- dntrkv 5y ago> 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.
- ska 5y agoBoth 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.
- throwkeep 5y agoNot sure if sarcastic. Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are all heavily engaging in censorship. For example, they banned people last year for talking about the lab leak hypothesis, which is now acceptably mainstream(1). They are currently censoring a Youtube channel(2) run by a PhD in biology, who has been interviewing MDs and the inventor of mRNA vaccines, and whose stated purpose is to help end the pandemic(3). 1) https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=170 https://youtu.be/sSfejgwbDQ8?t=170 (Jon Stewart on Colbert earlier this week) 2) https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1405234596820643840 https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1405234596820643840 3) https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1404474243128037378 https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1404474243128037378
- rchaud 5y agoAmerican companies booted their own head of state off their platforms. Careful you don't drown in all that freedom.
- Barrin92 5y agoisn't this actually the defining feature of commercial American television? You don't see a lot of incisive political commentary on Dancing with the Stars or a season of Survivor either basically cleansing entertainment of anything that could be considered incendiary and replacing it with people doing funny dances is something the American ad industry came up with a century ago. Like it's not as if American popular entertainment looks like German ARTE or some Scandinavian drama where politics and culture is baked into everything
- sjg007 5y agoAmerican companies can censor, they do it all the time. Free speech is protection of speech from prosecution by the government, not corporations.
- netr0ute 5y agoIf companies replace roles of the government, then this limitation no longer applies.
- ericls 5y agoIt’s easy to make money if you can sell addictive drugs before they are categorized as such.
- xvector 5y agoAre you implying that social media consumption should be regulated simply because people find it so good as to be addictive? Honestly, TikTok is a breath of fresh air compared to every other social media platform I've used. Positive, fun, and tailored content with no doomscrolling or negativity. It's just a fantastic platform.
- zffr 5y agoEasy? 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.
- ericls 5y agoDo you know how they got started?
- justicezyx 5y agoHe 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...
- runawaybottle 5y agoTikTok basically took the whole ice-bucket challenge and created a platform for it.
- rchaud 5y agoAlternatively, they made a far better version of Vine.
- ralusek 5y agoSo I've learned that TikTok allows copyrighted music to be played in videos, and just gives a cut of the revenue to the label. Why don't more social media have this arrangement? YouTube not allowing copyrighted music is insane to me. Just give the label a large fraction of the revenue from the watch time during the time that their music was playing. How hard can it be to negotiate this arrangement?
- the-dude 5y agoHow is YT not allowing copyrighted music? AFAIK, it is.
- Spivak 5y agoIt's up to the copyright owner if they want to take down or monetize the videos that have their IP in it.
- rchaud 5y agoThere are ways to get around YT's automatic strikes. There are numerous 'music reaction' channels where listeners play the music video in a small PIP window, and maybe shift the pitch a tad so it's not 100% identical to the original audio. This approach lets them play back the whole song + music video. Some rights holders are especially aggressive, and proactively search for infringing material, so this method isn't foolproof; if they manually flag it, the audio will be stripped from the video. But for the cases where the rights holders are happy to use automatic strikes, the workaround still works.
- madeofpalk 5y ago> YouTube not allowing copyrighted music is insane to me. Just give the label a large fraction of the revenue Youtube does exactly this. Upload music owned by labels that Youtube has a deal with and they'll get revenue.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- belval 5y agoI 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 phone, but I truly see it as the pinnacle of the stupidly addictive social media app and it scares me because it means that Chinese companies are just as capable as us to spin the next Facebook and distribute propaganda to the next generation.
- endisneigh 5y agoyour comment is contradictory - if there is no political content, what propaganda is there to distribute? per your own comment wouldn't they just be distributing the "catchy" content?
- xvector 5y agoThere isn't propaganda. I guess people say there is, because conspiracy theories are more fun than fact. But strong statements like "TikTok is propaganda" need to be supported with evidence. I would say that the highly tailored experience of the TikTok algorithm would make a propaganda op quite easy to detect. The algorithm is so ridiculously good, that you would instantly spot a propaganda video, or notice when your feed begins to skew from what you like to see.
- karaterobot 5y agoWasn't there something about how you couldn't find TikTok videos about the Hong Kong protests? Ahh, so the Guardian had some leaked moderation documents[1] implying there was an active moderation keeping them from being viewed. Buzzfeed said they did their own experiments and found no evidence that videos about Hong Kong were being removed[2]. I see no reason why both of those can't be true: if you control the algorithm, you don't need to delete anything, you can control with fine granularity how viral it's allowed to go. I guess that's a conspiracy theory, but for myself, I'm very skeptical that any media company operates in China with what most of us would call political neutrality and free speech. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-how-tiktok-censors-videos-that-do-not-please-beijing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/25/revealed-... [2] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/tiktok-users-are-finally-posting-about-hong-kong-but-only https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/tiktok-us...
- Spivak 5y agoHonestly, 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 because your hobbies don't map well to video snippets -- stuff like makeup, art, fashion, cooking, baking, dance, inde music, cosplay, interior decorating -- don't write it off. It's basically a social media paradise for women[1]. Like the early days of Tumblr but replace gifs with videos. [1] TikTok's format lends itself to hobbies stereotypically cultivated by women. The implication doesn't go the other way; loads of guys on TikTok. It also doesn't imply that every woman will find like it; don't @ me with logical fallacies.
- xvector 5y agoTikTok creators are pushing out so much incredible OC. It feels like half of the Reddit front page are just TikTok reposts (with the logo censored out, because Redditors are too cool to admit they like TikTok content.)
- cwkoss 5y agoI think how the 'human centipede' of content works is really interesting as it has evolved over time. Creators coalese in certain apps and consumers others. 4 chan greentext used to be pretty common on Reddit a decade ago, and 9gag would repost reddit content. Twitter text often gets reposted to tiktok and reddit. Tiktok videos often get reposted to Twitter or Reddit. Heck, many major 'journalism' outfits now regularly include tweets - sometimes thats even the entire content of an article. /r/AmITheAsshole or similar long-form reddit posts are regularly read to make content for youtube or podcasts. In terms of original amateur-created content, seems the current winners of each medium are: - short form text: twitter - long form text: reddit - short video: tiktok - long video: youtube? but seems fragile
- xvector 5y ago> - long form text: reddit I would say Medium has taken over, here?
- curiousllama 5y agoThe big difference between Tik Tok and everything else to me: when I stop scrolling, I feel _good_. On Instagram, I scroll until I hate myself. On Facebook, I used to scroll until I got frustrated. But on Tik Tok - it's a dopamine hit without the hangover.
- jensensbutton 5y agoYou have no attachment to the content you see on Tik Tok. Facebook and Instagram are social network based. Tik Tok is not.
- cruano 5y agoI'm also not attached to youtube and yet I never leave there happy either
- willio58 5y agoTiktok is definitely a social network. For example you can send videos to your “friends” only and it will show up first when they open the app. But, I get what you mean. Tiktok isn’t focused on friends, it feels more like a content stream similar to YouTube.
- sporedro 5y agoI agree, I don't get the comparison of Facebook to like YouTube or tiktok they're all different things... While YouTube and google may try to add features similar to Facebook and Facebook may add features similar to them I feel they're not in the same category... There's almost "personal social media" with Facebook and Instagram than just "social media" like tiktok, YouTube, even this site... I guess things like Twitter fall somewhere in the middle.
- IncRnd 5y agoThe 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."
- an_opabinia 5y agoHow did ByteDance lose $45b…
- tananaev 5y agoTikTok is currently only a small percentage of the revenue. ByteDance has quite a few apps in China. Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) is a big one, but they also have a very popular news app in China. They also have a separate app for longer videos than TikTok. And many other.
- dr_dshiv 5y agoThat is an insane amount of revenue. But I get it. My kids are addicts.
- DevKoala 5y agoTikTok 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.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI 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.
- DevKoala 5y agoIt depends on the content you are being linked to. It is hard for the platform to fix that. However, what I mean is that it is easy to get hooked consuming similar short videos and before you know it, you have spent almost half an hour on this thing you are trying to avoid. I believe it is the UI that makes it so easy to jump to the next video even on the browser.
- stronglikedan 5y ago> it is hard to not continue looking at other related clips. I don't have it installed, but when someone links me to a specific clip, it won't let me look at other clips without installing it. What am I doing wrong?
- DevKoala 5y agoI think it is the desktop vs mobile web UI. If they detect you are in a mobile, they will push you to download the app. I have seen it too.
- rednerrus 5y agoI've followed 1000 new people on TikTok in the past 6 months. I don't feel any pressure because none of the people know me IRL. The content is amazing.
- wolverine876 5y agoThere was a story awhile ago that TikTok's curation selected for relatively wealthy people, and I mean 'wealthy' the scale of rich countries. For example, they didn't want something shot in a home that looked impoverished, presumably because it wasn't the experience they wanted for their audience. I don't use TikTok, but a few times I've seen compilations of TikTok on YouTube, and the above description certainly matched what I saw. Also, the compilations show people who are overwhelmingly white. Is what I saw representative? Are they representative in the US, and maybe people in other places see something different? (Edit: And I see the appeal of TikTok, nice dopamine hits without any cost.) Those policies, if they exist, seem unhealthy for kids and for society: Lots of kids in the world have cell phones, but nly a small portion of the world would qualify for success on TikTok, and they are qualified by their money (and possibly ethnicity). It says to the vast majority who are poorer that you aren't part of society and no matter how good your video is, you can't qualify. It also would hide from the rich kids the vast reality of life, and that there is nothing threatening about poverty and poor people, and people who don't look like you.
- cwkoss 5y ago> TikTok's curation selected for relatively wealthy people Was this controlled in some effective way? Seems plausible that humans like looking at wealth, and so wealthy people tend to get more likes. It's like crowdsourced tabloids. > Also, the compilations show people who are overwhelmingly white I think that depends a lot on what filter bubble you get sorted into. Plant/science/compsi/engineering/lefist sections where I tend to hit like feel pretty diverse. The default 'prankbro/dance/thirsttrap/wealth porn' areas do seem predominantly white though.
- wolverine876 5y ago> Was this controlled in some effective way? According to the article, yes. Human curators were instructed on that policy. I don't remember how/if it was implemented in algorithms, but per the article, humans controlled who succeeded.
- babesh 5y agoMy feed isn’t overwhelmingly white. It is very multiracial and not that US centric either. I suspect you give the algorithms cues as to what you want to see. I suspect my cues are the people I follow and I basically follow anyone who posts something I found fun or interesting.
- passivate 5y agoCan someone who knows this stuff explain how TikTok actually makes money?
- adjkant 5y agoSenator, we run ads!
- passivate 5y agoI guess they do organic ads, as I don't recall ever seeing a proper professionally produced ad. I admit I haven't spent much time on it though..
- adjkant 5y agoIt's genuinely interesting you haven't seen any, or perhaps you haven't used the app in the past 6 months? There's tons of them today, they've been cranking the ad load hard. I see like Nike and the like all the time. It might be they only show ads to users who use regularly.
- rvz 5y agoAds. Like every other social network.
- sureglymop 5y agoWhat I truly find remarkable is the rebranding of Musical.ly to TikTok. At first I wasn't quite sure that this really is essentially the exact same platform, just rebranded. When you look at the application ID on Android it is "com.zhiliaoapp.musically", suggesting that it is most probably based directly on Musical.ly. Musical.ly has been around since 2014, steadily accumulating more users. So it isn't like TikTok just blew up out of nowhere either.