Everyone is aware of the famous video sharing app TikTok. The app gained rapid popularity in Asia, the United States and some other parts of the world and was declared the most downloaded app in the United States in 2018.
The immense popularity of the app proved profitable to its owner ByteDance, which, according to reports, earned a revenue of $ 7 million through TikTok in the first half of 2019.
According to the international news organization Reuters, the Company raked in almost 50-60 billion yuan ($ 7 billion to $ 8.4 billion) through TikTok, its Chinese version Douyin and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao.
ByteDance is a Beijing based startup founded in 2012. The startup became a success thanks to its product Jinri Toutiao, which is a news and information content platform widely popular in China. The Company then went on to acquire another startup called Musical.ly, which it then converted into TikTok. Considered one of the most valuable unicorns in the world, the success of ByteDance earned its founder Zhang Yiming a place in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index 2019.
ByteDance had almost 800 million daily active users in 2018 and was reportedly valued at around $ 78 million by some sources. Although TikTok is a widely popular product by the Company, ByteDance makes most of its revenue from Douyin as TikTok is in its early stage to earn revenue.
However, the Company is facing issues like censoring politically sensitive content in China and facing investigation in relation to children’s privacy violations in the U.S., and Britain.
This did not affect ByteDance as it plans to expand beyond China. In an effort to go global, ByteDance launched its own search engine, a work efficiency app called Lark and a Wikipedia like site called Baike.com. The Company is also planning to launch a music streaming app and increased its number of employees from 40,000 to 50,000 in just a year.