TikTok generated nearly $4 billion in advertising revenue last year, with a goal of tripling in 2022

LatePost learned that TikTok's advertising revenue in 2021 will reach nearly $4 billion (about 25.46 billion yuan). Multiple salespeople said the goal for the new year is to at least triple growth, that is, sales of at least $12 billion (about 76.37 billion yuan), which is comparable to Baidu's advertising revenue in 2020.

TikTok has had a rare respite in the past year, and the team has also taken this opportunity to accelerate the commercialization process, and the advertising, overseas e-commerce and live broadcast teams have carried out a large-scale expansion.

According to one ByteDance source, TikTok now has thousands of salespeople, mainly in North America. According to "LatePost", at the beginning of 2021, TikTok's advertising products and technical teams in Austin, USA and Mountain View, California, have doubled.

Currently, TikTok has nearly 20,000 employees. As recently as early 2020, TikTok had fewer than 4,000 employees.

TikTok's advertising business was born from ByteDance's domestic commercialization department, which built a mature commercialization strategy, product and sales system, which enabled TikTok's advertising business to quickly get on track in the early stage of launch. ByteDance has also directly promoted the pangle, a domestic advertising product, overseas.

However, from the end of 2020, ByteDance has made a clearer distinction between overseas business and domestic business. Currently, TikTok's advertising business is run by the official platform TikTok For Business (TTFB), led by Blake Chandlee, TikTok's global head of commercialization, reporting to TikTok's head, Zhou Shouzi. Previously, Blake Chandler spent more than 12 years at Meta.

According to official data, TikTok reached 1 billion monthly active users worldwide in September 2021. In 2020, it surpassed Meta's Facebook and WhatsApp to rank first in the world.

However, compared with products such as Facebook, TikTok still has many shortcomings in the advertising business. For example, Facebook's product form determines that it can grasp more perfect user tags, including real names and social relationships, which helps it to make more accurate advertising recommendations; in addition, Facebook has more large customers. LatePost learned that TikTok's current advertisers are mainly small and medium-sized Internet companies.

"This is also the reason why TikTok has begun to vigorously develop e-commerce in the past year: on the one hand, in order to open up new sources of income; more importantly, the e-commerce business is closer to large customers and big brands, and once it is done, advertisers are certainly willing to leave more budgets here." A person close to ByteDance said. (Duan Xu, Gao Honghao)