China’s viral king ByteDance is the first major Chinese tech player that made a mark on the world
From Toutiao to TikTok, ByteDance is a company that has put content at the core of its business and is serving it with the help of artificial intelligence. Even though the firm is young, ByteDance’s viral apps have irked rivals including Tencent and Facebook.
ByteDance is, in many ways, different to the classical Chinese tech giant. Unlike many local companies that looked up to the West for inspiration, ByteDance decided to export Chinese products, most notably with short videos.
But ByteDance has achieved more than that: It made Facebook copy them, after the social giant launched the short video app Lasso -- aimed at ByteDance’s TikTok.
Not bad for a company that only started up in 2012.
Around that time, ByteDance’s brain and founder Zhang Yiming noticed something. He saw that there were more and more people staring at their phones instead of reading newspapers – an observation that looks obvious now, but less so in 2012. So he created Jinri Toutiao – Today’s Headlines, an AI-powered news aggregation app that tailors articles towards individual readers, much like Facebook does with its feed.