Eps 1: The Rise of Tik Tok
The future of TikTok's presence in the US is uncertain: The Trump administration is threatening to ban the app, citing national security risks over its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance.
The FTC and US Justice Department are now looking into allegations it failed to live up to its 2019 agreement.
According to a 1988 law , Trump has the authority to block foreign business deals pertaining to US companies if he deems the deals are a national security threat.
Host
Madison Walker
Podcast Content
Its parent company, ByteDance, had $2.5 billion in revenue in 2017 and was valued at $75 billion, making it the highest-rated privately held start-up in the world and overtaking Uber. Few tech startups are as fast in the market as Beijing - based on Byte Dance - and TikTok has become one of China's largest and most successful technology companies.
The app features self-made videos that users create and share on their phones, as well as photos and videos of their pets.
The scrappy, silly and fast-moving content has delighted a young audience around the world. The merger took Tik Tok to a new level, resulting in a huge video database created by the two companies, as well as the ability to merge existing accounts into a larger user community.
In 2018, Tik Tok was named the most-downloaded iPhone app in the world and dominates the social platform. In the United States alone, it has more than 1.5 million active users and over 3 million subscribers.
TikTok has had a significant impact on the social media landscape in the US and other countries around the world, particularly in Asia.
Lasso, a lip syncing app purchased by ByteDance and merged with TikTok, had over 100 million monthly active users when it was purchased by Tik Tok in 2018. Lasso was downloaded by 70,000 US users in the first quarter of 2018, compared with just 1.5 million users at the end of the same period in 2017. Musical, which currently has over 300 million users, and Musical.com, an app for musicians and musicians only.
The US Federal Trade Commission fined TikTok $5.7 million last year for failing to obtain parental consent to collect data on its users "personal information, such as phone numbers and email addresses. The app, which is downloaded to both Apple and Android, has been banned by lawmakers because it promotes cultural degradation of youth.
The ban was lifted when ByteDance's lawyers successfully argued that its systems were sorting out offensive content, preventing nude videos from being shown, and continuously updating them to identify disturbing videos and develop more personalized recommendations for content. The videos are constructed in a language that does not pose any significant barriers, and few of them have anything to do with the news, so they are not easily dated.
The company is reportedly focusing its growth efforts on the US, Japan and India, which are swelling user populations, and now have more than two hundred million users.
Stagnant growth and impressive user retention have made ByteDance one of the fastest growing social networks in the world, and large sums are being spent on it. The stunning growth of its user base tells a different story to investors who normally bet on organic growth in social apps. It has hacked the market by aggressively courting influencers from other social networks and spending huge sums on advertising, much of it on rival platforms.
Music is still a central part of TikTok's DNA and always has been, but its parent company ByteDance already has a significant foothold in China under the Douyin brand name. Musical, which only launched in 2014, is home to user-generated lip syncing videos . After the acquisition of Musical in 2017, the company announced that it would merge the Tik Tok brand with its own brand in the US and other countries.
The original incarnation of TikTok, Musical, became popular among digital natives after its inception in 2014. Musical reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, exploded almost overnight and has since enjoyed steadily rising popularity in both the US and China and other countries.
Chinese technology company Bytedance launched a version of the musical called Douyin in 2016, before launching it overseas as TikTok in 2017. It was the brainchild of the Beijing-based company, which once owned a musical and launched in the US in 2014 with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
When it launched internationally, the social media app was branded Tiktok, which merged with Musical a year later. The application allows users to view, create and share 15-second videos .