But the nice thing about TikTok is because it’s this large community, most videos that are made are actually just adaptations of other people’s videos. If you look at its revenue as sort of a lagging indicator, then you would expect its revenue to follow more of a Douyin-like trajectory of growth in the future. You don’t actually have to come up with your own idea. So again, I’m not a heavy user either. In the case of Instagram, some people do use it as part social communication product and part as interest graph product.
And this happens in any number of ways. Reading their past interviews, it was partly because at the time Douyin was getting started, they could see musical.ly, but also this is the year — 2016 — they started developing it in early 2016, this is when big screen smartphones are all the rage. You have some of the same risks as Microsoft in terms of content moderation, but they’re a much better match in terms of the product, right.

On TikTok, you could already do 60-second videos, and Douyin can do I think 5-minute ones, with up to 15 minutes later. One is, they spent just an ungodly amount of money on marketing and advertising.

Pandata But at the same time, I think it’s true that, like you were saying, video is something that China has been excelling at. And I have been going back to China a lot over the past decade and observing their tech scene from you know, as an outsider, really.

Their effective acquisition cost per user was super high back then.

It’s really hard to come up with creative ideas, because TikTok has a fairly high skill bar for its content.

So TikTok is, as we know, under Trump’s executive order to be banned from the United States, as well as its parent, ByteDance. So people were making all these videos for Facebook and making no money off of them. And, I feel like Twitter just has so many other problems of their own to solve. They are always competing with Fortnite and things like that, and TikTok certainly is an attention space competitor to them that would diversify their portfolio. You can get updates on it by subscribing to our newsletter, at techbuzzchina.com. If these videos were all like 10 minutes long or 20 minutes long, then it might not work as well, because you wouldn’t want to sit through so many of them before the app learned what your tastes were.
And then the algorithm effectively acts like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, in trying to help different groups of people find each other — people with similar tastes in videos to find each other.

So the culture and the content that you have early on in a network can really establish the tone for what becomes dominant or acceptable in the moving forward.

I was always fascinated, in the past few years going back to China, when I would meet with different companies, there was always a line item for operations.

[22:40]And I think if you ask most people who are experts in machine learning, deep learning, they would guess that the ByteDance TikTok algorithm isn’t necessarily based on anything revolutionary. About There’s some ads on top of what’s going on in the app and new features they want you to discover. After all, TikTok is the first non-utility app and consumer internet product made by a Chinese company that has really hit it big globally.Certainly, I had been thinking about this for a while since 2018, when I had gone back to visit China and caught up with some of my old colleagues from the old Hulu Beijing office, some of whom worked at ByteDance now.