TikTok is starting to slow down

TikTok slows down the tempo

Douyin, which has been racing all the way and making miracles, has finally begun to slow down.

Recently, Liang Rubo, the current head of ByteDance, sent an internal letter in which two important things were announced.

First, announce the adjustment of the cycle of target setting and review, changing the original bimonthly OKR to quarterly OKR; Second, the frequency of company-level meetings will be slowed down, and the original bimonthly meeting will be changed to quarterly meetings, and the latest bimonthly meeting will be adjusted from early March to early April.

In short, Douyin under Liang Rubo began to slow down.

As for the reasons for the adjustment, Liang Rubo pointed out in an internal letter that most of the company's business is now relatively mature and complex, the bimonthly changes are not obvious, and the review period can be longer.

This adjustment is actually more in line with ByteDance's consistent "flexible" style, when the business changes rapidly, or is in a critical period, you can add an additional review and alignment meeting; When business changes slowly, you can choose to have meetings every two quarters.

This move shows that Douyin has begun to slow down from the strategic level of the group.

Previously, Zhang Yiming also said when he stepped down as CEO, "Every day, I have to listen to a lot of reports and summaries, make a lot of approvals and decisions, which can easily lead to internal perspectives and slow updating of knowledge structure." This is also a key reason why Zhang Yiming believes that he has been "eating the old book".

In contrast, in 2020, the number of daily active users of Douyin exceeded 600 million, accounting for 60% of China's 1 billion Internet users at that time, and then this data growth began to slow down.

Today, three years later, Douyin's overall daily active data has exceeded 700 million, and its monthly active users have reached about 842 million, which is one step closer to the industry traffic ceiling.

In the short video track, it will be more and more difficult for Douyin to achieve further user growth, which is reflected in the data, that is, the user growth is slow.

In addition to the slowdown in user growth, the well-known name of "APP factory" is becoming more and more invisible.

Data show that ByteDance's revenue in 2020 will be nearly 240 billion yuan, of which advertising revenue will be 175 billion yuan, e-commerce revenue will be 6 billion yuan, live broadcast turnover will be 45-50 billion yuan, game sector turnover will be 4-5 billion yuan, and education field will be 2-3 billion yuan.

Behind the super high flow of water, in addition to the increasingly huge Douyin and today's headlines, it is difficult for ByteDance to find a third fist product.

In 2022, some new and old business lines such as ByteDance's Recognition APP, Feichat APP, and Metaverse Social App Party Island have hit a wall one after another. Douyin's third fist product is also coming more slowly than we thought.

What is more noteworthy is that Byte, which has always maintained rapid expansion and vigorously recruited externally, has also entered the track of cost reduction and efficiency increase from 2022.

Now that nearly two years have passed since Zhang Yiming stepped down as CEO, the Douyin Group in the era of Liang Rubo has begun to slow down and seek stability.

Perhaps for TikTok, slowing down is a good thing.

Why is TikTok slowing down

Compared with Liang Rubo's slow pace, in recent times, in terms of business development, Douyin is undoubtedly the most ferocious of the Internet giants.

On January 28, the Douyin APP was launched on Douyin Supermarket, and users can enter Douyin Supermarket to shop by searching for "Douyin Supermarket" in the search bar or shopping entrance.

On February 7, it was reported that Douyin takeaway will be launched nationwide on March 1, and then Douyin denied that the "group buying and delivery" project is currently only in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu pilots, and will consider gradually expanding pilot cities according to the pilot situation, and there is no specific timetable at present.

This is very interesting: the head proposed to slow down the pace, but in the specific business expansion, Douyin's consistent accelerated expansion style has not changed.

So TikTok has slowed down, is it true or false?

My understanding is that as a 100,000-level Internet "big ship", whether it is a full rudder to accelerate or choose to reduce speed, it will take a certain amount of time to transition.

Whether from the internal organizational structure of the group or the expansion of external business, Douyin's slowdown is not a false statement.

First of all, one of the main reasons for Douyin's slowdown: the number of companies has skyrocketed, and large companies have become sick.

During the traffic upswing in previous years, ByteDance's rapid expansion attracted the attention of the industry, and the group's HR frantically recruited people in multiple recruitment channels.

In 2020 alone, ByteDance planned to hire 40,000 employees in China, and by the end of the year, the number of regular employees worldwide had exceeded 110,000. This speed of expansion and growth has made other Internet giants look away.

A typical example is the Feishu team, the number of office software team has grown from 2,000 to more than 8,000 in 2022 alone, while the number of monthly active users of the Feishu APP is only 9.3 million.

But the frantic expansion of the team and personnel size has not brought exponential growth to the group, but has reduced the efficiency and average output. For example, 8,000 people fly to 9 million users, while the DingTalk team of about 1,500 people faces 253 million monthly active users.

The huge internal organizational structure has brought an industry problem to the young ByteDance: the disease of large companies.

Invalid reports, frequent meetings, Liang Rubo emphasized in internal letters that "the bimonthly meeting takes a long time to prepare (even some departments will rehearse), but there is less information increment and less quality discussion." ”

This is a big reason why ByteDance slows down.

To this end, Liang Rubo made a major adjustment of his internal organizational structure, established six business segments: Douyin, Vigorous Education, Feishu, Volcano Engine, Sunrise Lightyear and TikTok, and once again clarified the organization's goal of "fattening and thinning".

On the one hand, it is to control the growth rate of the organization and reduce the recruitment plan for 2022~2023; On the other hand, businesses are encouraged to flexibly adjust OKRs to their actual needs and should be given longer patience.

In addition to the huge internal organizational structure, resulting in reduced efficiency, from the perspective of external business expansion, Douyin in the future will also have to face the status quo of "slowing down".

Because in the expansion of e-commerce, local life to store, takeaway to home and other businesses, Douyin began to gradually enter the deep water area.

For example, e-commerce business, after the rapid growth of live streaming e-commerce in the first two years, the industry and Douyin have realized the growth limitations of simply doing "interest e-commerce", so from 2022, Douyin began to focus on the construction of "shelf e-commerce".

Last month's "Douyin Supermarket" business was officially launched, which is a model for the layout of Douyin shelf e-commerce. But this narrow and crowded track is obviously not something that can be easily broken by traffic alone.

To enter the deep water area of e-commerce, Douyin needs to face the perfect e-commerce system of the Taotao system, the warehousing and logistics advantages of JD.com, and the extremely low price of Pinduoduo. Li Chengdong, founder of Dolphin Think Tank e-commerce, once wrote that during the Double 11 period, the peak number of unique visitors to Douyin Mall reached 300 million, but only 1.2% of these people actually placed orders.

It can be seen that it is difficult to "make a miracle" in the deep water area of e-commerce, and slowing down the pace is an inevitable result.

TikTok has also started to do shelf e-commerce

Not only e-commerce, but also Douyin's local life business, after experiencing the practice of in-store group buying with asset-light operation, has also begun to enter a more difficult track: takeaway to home.

Although the launch of Douyin takeaway has attracted the attention of the whole industry, takeaway is really not a simple business, industry leader Meituan has always been trapped in low gross profit operations, and Douyin, which lacks a distribution system, will inevitably slow down to achieve results in this asset-heavy and low gross profit industry.

Not to mention the new digital services such as cloud computing, meta-universe, and ChatGPT that have emerged in the past two years, these tracks all have extremely high requirements for technology precipitation, and if Douyin wants to seek greater breakthroughs in the new business category, it must sink down and engage in research and development.

On the whole, from the current Douyin's huge and complex internal organizational structure, into the deep water area of e-commerce takeaway business and other aspects, Douyin is indeed slowing down.

Judging from Liang Rubo's flexible adjustment, he is obviously not too anxious about slowing down the pace, but has given more patience, hoping to "be truth-seeking and pragmatic, frank and clear." ”

The slowing TikTok began to slowly open its mouth towards longer-term goals and greater ambitions.

Rome was not built in a day

"This year, I hope that the company's mentality can slow down to some extent, on the one hand, to avoid the baggage of short-term business anxiety, on the other hand, to have a broad imagination of the future without fixed expectations, and have longer-term goals."

This sentence was proposed by Zhang Yiming at the 2021 annual meeting of the group, when ByteDance had gone through 9 years, and several of the aforementioned growth problems began to appear.

In this regard, Zhang Yiming's Liang Rubo's attitude is basically the same, maintain a "normal mind", and treat the past and future with more patience.

Because "Rome was not built in a day", the complete system of Taobao encountered by Douyin in its expansion and the logistics advantages of JD.com were not built in a day.

Of course, the more bare reason may be: it's useless to rush.

According to Ding Daoshi, "Douyin has traffic, technology, funds, channels, and basically it should have it." More importantly, Douyin has the advantage of algorithms, and doing new business can often do more with less. ”

Douyin, which gathers multiple advantages, has advantages that are rare on other platforms in carrying out many new businesses, and traffic and content advantages are the most critical points.

It stands to reason that if Douyin can take new businesses such as e-commerce or takeaway as the core to make a strong breakthrough, the new business that gathers the above advantageous resources is likely to succeed.

But the facts are different, because in the short term, the "APP factory" model has not worked, graphic APP is also under the impact of short video, traffic slows down, and the group only has Douyin APP left to carry hope.

So we see that they installed e-commerce, local life, social networking and other businesses on the Douyin APP, in an attempt to build a super APP.

When an APP carries multiple services, the original traffic advantage will inevitably be diverted and irrigated to different "fields".

The so-called advantages and resources are divided in the "snail shell" of an APP, and it is difficult to form a fixed-point breakthrough in the core business.

From this point of view, Douyin, which actively slows down the pace, will have more time and more space to think about the best monetization solution for the traffic economy.

Only by thinking clearly about these problems, instead of flooding and overflowing, can Douyin go further. At least Zhang Yiming's "mentality can be slowed down" in order to aim for longer-term goals.

We're looking forward to what TikTok will look like after slowing down.

Author | Old electricity