ByteDance

Company Overview

ByteDance Ltd. is an Internet technology company headquartered in Beijing. It was founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. ByteDance's core product, Toutiao ("Headlines"), is a content platform in China and worldwide. Toutiao started out as a news recommendation engine and gradually evolved into a platform delivering content in a variety of formats, such as texts, images, question-and-answer posts, microblogs, and videos. Toutiao offers its users personalized information feeds that are powered by machine learning algorithms. A content feed is updated based on what the machine learns about a user's reading preferences. ByteDance acquired social media start-up Musical.ly and combined it with Douyin into a single application under the TikTok name. It also runs BuzzVideo and Vigo Video. ByteDance had over 800 million daily active users (over 1 billion accumulated users) across all of its content platforms as of November 2018.