Tiktok growth story
Deeper look into Tiktok's global growth narrative, key driving levers behind the same and how it changed content creation and consumption for us all
Tiktok is a the star product of Bytedance, Bytedance is a corporate leviathan with various killer products under its hood spread across online services such as gaming, entertainment and productivity. Core flagship names under it being : Toutio, Douyin and Tiktok.
The Tiktok experience is such, that I have personally spent hours sometime gawking the original content on the platform, senses numbed by it’s personalised feed and original UGC
Growth Story of Tiktok
It started as a side bet in an already crowded space, In late 2016 Bytedance launched A.me, already a late mover in Short Video apps in China.
Recommendation re-wired
Tables turned in the Q4 of 2017, DAU doubled, Day 30 retention jumped from 8% to 20%, Average time spent soared from 20 Mins to 40 Mins. But what happened ? or rather what changed then, Turns out a solid team of engineers were assigned recommendation for this product.
instead of a search driven(pull based) Tiktok mastered the recommendation approach(push based)
People looking for information(Pull) v/s Information looking for people(Push)
Broader positioning
Douyin in china started with lip sync videos amongst pre-teens, early adopters were mostly pre-teens. It started cleverly targeting young trend setting art students and finally in 2018 it shifted to a more neutral positioning of Record beautiful life(serving users in all walks of life)
Besides, in late 2017, Bytedance wanted to expand to western markets, it bought Musical.ly for ~1 B $ to catalyse it’s foreign userbase
User profile interest graph
Bytedance centrally builds user profile via its host of internet services, ie a new user on Tiktok is looked upon onto other applications, and if found, they start serving them content basis past preference on other services. Basically a strong central user profile interest graph
Creator friendly content flywheel
Tiktok early on understood it is really important to farm its creators, make their lives easier in terms of posting content and getting eyeballs. So it spent good effort in developing creator friendly tools to make it super easy for 5-50 year olds to create and post videos easily.
This serves multiple purposes : Creators create and upload content easily, more content is fed into recommendation, which helps users stay engaged, who convert to creators, who create a more diverse content pool
With this I would like to wrap this week’s newsletter, hoping to see you on the next edition of Growth Weekly
If you liked the content here and would want to dive deeper into the topic, checkout below :
https://nextbn.ggvc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/TikTok-ByteDance-Report.pdf
https://influencermarketinghub.com/tiktok-growth/
https://mikeyny.medium.com/tik-tok-boom-the-story-of-tiktoks-explosive-growth-814c9fd604c2