Douyin, the Chinese version of the short-video sharing app TikTok, reports 600 million daily active users as of August.
The past year saw 22 million content creators gained more than 41.7 billion yuan ($6.15 billion) on the platform, according to ByteDance China CEO Kelly Zhang, who spoke at the Douyin Creator Conference in Shanghai.
Douyin will also invest traffic resources worth 10 billion yuan to help creators and increase their income to 80 billion yuan in next year.
Both Douyin and TikTok have contributed largely to the success of ByteDance, which is one of the most valuable privately-held Chinese tech firms.
TikTok had around 700 million monthly active users in July and over 2 billion in global downloads.
The two applications function the same in terms of creating and sharing short videos with music and special effects featured on the apps.
However, Douyin offers more advanced features, such as a more comprehensive homepage, e-commerce, a sophisticated set-up for official accounts and sponsored games, live streaming, and uploading of full-length films, according to a February report from research firm Gartner. Some of those features are being tried by TikTok.
China tech law
ByteDance has said that it will “strictly adhere to” China’s new rules on tech companies’ takeover of companies overseas.
ByteDance has pledged to follow the Chinese government’s new takeover law regarding Chinese tech companies overseas. These new export controls could potentially be used to hinder the sale of TikTok’s US operations.
China has listed several restricted items in the new takeover rules, which include some of the methods TikTok uses to target who sees which videos. A large part of its success can be attributed to its ability to quickly identify and cater to users’ interests.
On August 28, the Chinese government, for the first time since 2008, decided to amend the list of technologies subject to export restrictions.
Under the new rules, two “civilian use” technologies that could directly impact TikTok have been included in the restricted list, namely interactive interfaces powered by artificial intelligence and personalized recommendations and notifications powered by data analysis.
Theoretically, Bytedance would need to ask for permission to sell the use of any related tech to a foreign entity, and preliminary approval could take up to a month to get.
If, as a result, the firm would be prohibited from including TikTok’s recommendation engine as part of a sale, it would effectively cripple the app. This means that whoever takes over the US operations would need to develop a recommendation system of their own.
However, ByteDance pledged to follow the changes in rules. Company lawyer Erich Andersen said: “We are studying the new regulations that were released Friday. As with any cross-border transaction, we will follow the applicable laws, which in this case include those of the US and China.”
