The Tik Tok Takeover
https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-strategy-behind-tiktoks-global-rise
Want to see comedic nurses or military officers lip syncing to baby shark? Or entertainers reenacting famous memes like “Hit or Miss”? If yes, then Tik Tok is the place for you. You’ve probably heard about, if not fell into, the TikTok spiral that seems to have the whole world enraptured in its innovative and entertaining 15 second clips. At its core TikTok, created by Chinese company ByteDance, is an app that enables users to create and share short videos set to music. But with 663 million downloads in 2018 itself, TikTok’s origin story and marketing strategy is a prime example of building networks and bridging the gap between two giant components (the network within China and beyond it).
The article attached examines how Tik Tok came to be, a borderless company that grew from takeovers — most notably the takeover of Musical.ly where “ByteDance paid an estimated $900 million to acquire Musical.ly, a social video app based in Shanghai with more than 200 million users worldwide and a large following in the U.S”. Merging Tik Tok’s AI‑directed streams with the pre-existing user knowledge and innovation of Musical.ly’s product innovation, ByteDance has been able to create an app that caters to multiple, multi-faceted networks. With each takeover, Tik Tok’s company has fused the network of those companies into its own, gradually building up to its now 500 million active users across the globe. Taking over other companies like Flipagram, a video and photo creation app, and investing millions into Live.me, has enabled ByteDance to truly branch out — in a most profuse, ever-expanding, and explosive way.
Another major strategy that the company has employed is having dual versions of Tik Tok – one for China’s internet censored market and another for the rest of the world — this two-pronged strategy enables the company to be in control of both of two giant components found within the global social media network, so that together, they form a massive monopoly. The company has broken barriers with this strategy of dual networks, acting kind of as a ‘structural hole’ linking the worlds of social media within restrictive China and the rest of the globe. With this game-changing strategy, the way forward is bound lead to more innovations and improvements in the tech industry — especially its creation of online social networks and niches.