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On December 20, according to foreign media reports, ByteDance's annual sales in 2023 increased by 30% to US$110 billion (about 784.3 billion yuan), surpassing Tencent. In this regard, ByteDance did not respond.
Judging from the revenue in the first half of the year, Byte has completed the surpassing of Tencent. According to The Information, Byte's revenue increased by more than 40% in the second quarter to $29 billion; Revenue for the first half of the year was about $54 billion. Last year, the company generated $85 billion in annual revenue. Tencent's financial report shows that in the first half of this year, its revenue was about 299.2 billion yuan, or about 41.3 billion US dollars, a year-on-year increase of 11%.
ByteDance's main revenue comes from domestic advertising and e-commerce, but TikTok in overseas markets has become its revenue driver, and has a high growth expectation, Douyin's overseas version of TikTok has become the world's largest short video platform, in recent years, TikTok has led the rapid growth of ByteDance's overseas revenue. In contrast, Tencent has maintained more stable development in the domestic market. The success of going overseas may become an important factor for bytes to surpass Tencent in revenue.
-- The birth of a new "giant" of the Internet
In March 2012, Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., Ltd. was incorporated, and in August of the same year, Toutiao APP was officially launched.
From 2013 to 2017, ByteDance successively took advantage of the Internet self-media dividend to start content production, during which it successively launched apps such as "Toutiao", "Wukong Q&A" and "Micro Toutiao", marking the construction of ByteDance's content production platform. In addition, ByteDance also caught up with the domestic short video outlet in 2016, and social short videos such as "Volcano Small Video" and "Douyin" were launched one after another, establishing the status of the leading Internet company.
In 2017, ByteDance increased its layout in the field of overseas short videos: on the one hand, the overseas version of Volcano Small Video Vigo Video and Douyin's overseas version of TikTok were launched one after another, and on the other hand, the company wholly acquired the American short video application Flipagram and the $1 billion acquisition of the music short video platform Musical.ly to further improve the layout of the overseas short video market. In addition, ByteDance has also invested and acquired companies such as Dailyhunt, BABE, and News Republic abroad.
-- Overseas expansion opens up the traffic ceiling
In the stage of globalization, ByteDance's "Toutiao" APP also has a clear development plan for the layout of overseas markets. On the one hand, it continues to launch overseas versions of existing products, including Toutiao's overseas version of TopBuzz, Volcano Small Video overseas version of Vigo Video, and Douyin short video overseas version of Tik Tok. On the other hand, in October 2016, it invested in Dailyhunt, India's largest content aggregation platform; At the end of 2016, it held a controlling stake in BABE, a recommended reading platform for Indonesian news; In February 2017, it wholly acquired Flipagram, a short-time frequency application in the United States; In November, it acquired News Republic, a global mobile news service operator, and Musical.ly music video sharing and interactive social networking app. At present Musical.ly the number of daily active users worldwide exceeds 20 million, and North America accounts for the majority of active users.
On the whole, under the increasingly saturated domestic traffic dividend, Toutiao has carried out global exploration with the strategy of "technology going overseas + localized operation", and its overseas users have accounted for nearly 20% as of the first half of 2018, opening the traffic ceiling of the company's overseas expansion.
- Short video stage: the scale of active users on Douyin
At present, the active users of Douyin and Kuaishou, the two major short video platforms, account for more than half of the entire market size, and Douyin's user scale is even better. According to the short video industry user data released by QuestMobile, in May 2022, the number of monthly active users on the main Douyin site was 675 million, a year-on-year increase of 7.2%; The number of monthly active users of Douyin Express was 218 million, a year-on-year increase of 36.1%; The number of monthly active users of Kuaishou's main station was 393 million, a year-on-year decrease of 7.5%; The number of monthly active users of Kuaishou Express was 211 million, a year-on-year increase of 21.8%.
——抖音广告收入TOP10
According to the data released by Douyin, in the first half of 2022, the top 10 beauty care in typical media advertising revenue ranked first with a revenue share of more than 20%, and it is also the only industry in the TOP10 list with a proportion of more than 10%.
Liu Jingjing, deputy dean of the School of Cultural Industry Management of Communication University of China, said that with the popularization of 5G technology, the video era is coming. The short video industry as a whole will usher in broader development or more diverse application scenarios. User participation Xi needs to be cultivated, and there will be more room for professional users and market entities.
Tian Feng, a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that in terms of the future development of short videos, from the perspective of duration, the current short video has overlapped with the production of previous videos, if it is a 15-minute video, it is actually similar to a short drama, this situation is actually a cross-media, or a cross-category fusion, and the trend of this integration may be more obvious in the future. From a commercial point of view, there may be more commercial opportunities in this kind of long video, such as advertising, endorsements, ...... This opportunity will increase because more content can be involved in long videos, but this will depend on the content and quality of long and short video production institutions.
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