TikTok started life as the export version of a Chinese app built in seven months
ByteDance built Douyin in roughly seven months in 2016 and saw it pass 100 million users within a year. Its founder then argued that China held only a fifth of the world's internet users, so the company cloned the idea for everyone else, bought a lip-sync startup and called the result TikTok.
Douyin, whose name means shaking sound, launched on 20 September 2016 under the name A.me before being renamed that December. Within a year it was serving more than a billion video views a day. Zhang Yiming, ByteDance's founder, made the case for going abroad bluntly: a company confined to China would lose to rivals chasing the other four-fifths of users. The overseas twin went live internationally in September 2017, and the two apps look alike but run separately; Douyin adds features such as face search, shopping and hotel booking.
Growth came partly by acquisition. On 9 November 2017 ByteDance spent nearly a billion dollars on Musical.ly, a Shanghai startup with an office in Santa Monica whose app, released in 2014, let users post short lip-sync and comedy clips. On 2 August 2018 the two were merged into one app under the TikTok name, with accounts carried over. By January 2018 it already topped free download charts in Thailand and elsewhere.
Celebrities followed, from Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk in 2018 to Jennifer Lopez and Will Smith, and in 2019 creators could add merchandise links to videos. A multi-year deal with the National Football League was announced that September, two days before the league's 100th season opened in Chicago. Downloads passed two billion in April 2020, and the company reported reaching a billion users in September 2021, the year it made about 4 billion dollars from advertising. Shou Zi Chew became chief executive in May 2021.
The service hosts clips from three seconds up to an hour long and relies on recommendation algorithms to push creators toward new audiences, which has helped trends in food, fashion and music spread worldwide. It has also faced criticism over data privacy, mental health, misinformation and how addictive its feed is, and some countries, including India and Afghanistan, have banned it fully or partly.
Source: TikTok
