The Lord of Short Videos

Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance

Author: Mathew Brennan

Publisher: Westland Books

Pages:220

Price: Rs 399

According to some reports, TikTok is trying to re-enter India under a new name — TickTok. Its parent ByteDance has apparently filed for a trade mark for the new name. Though it has been gone for over a year now, and multiple apps have tried to fill its place in India, none of them have managed to become the undisputed Lord of Short Videos in the country. There is a good chance that if ByteDance is allowed in the country, it will rapidly get back both its content creators and its loyal viewership.

Meanwhile in the US, ByteDance has won a significant battle. Former President Donald Trump tried to ban it but it has reportedly overtaken YouTube in terms of average US watch time for videos.

TikTok was banned in India along with 58-plus other Chinese origin apps last year, in June 2020 at the height of the India-China border tension. At that time, India was probably the biggest market for the viral short video app. Later, the income tax department filed cases against ByteDance for tax evasion and froze its bank accounts though it has now been allowed to operate them.

Much is happening now on the ByteDance and TikTok front but very little is still known about it compared to other Chinese internet giants such as Alibaba and Tencent. Nor is ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming as well known outside China as Jack Ma of Alibaba or Pony Ma of Tencent. Mr Zhang, though, may be having the last laugh over his better known rivals in China — so far, he appears to be on the right side of the authorities unlike his peers who are being chastised by the Chinese government.

Mathew Brennan’s book on Yiming, the phenomenal rise of ByteDance and TikTok is both an absolutely fascinating read as well as rather frustrating. It is fascinating because Mr Brennan has been following the Zhang Yiming tale for a long time and the picture of the Chinese entrepreneur he paints is riveting as are the details of all the apps and businesses that he started, some failures and many successes.

It is frustrating because Mr Brennan took a conscious decision to stop the book around the time ByteDance sued Donald Trump for forcing it to break up TikTok and led to bidders such as Microsoft and Oracle vying to buy it up. But as Mr Brennan points out in the Epilogue, he did not want to speculate on a fast-changing scenario and anything he said would get outdated within days. As he says, this is hardly going to be the only book written on ByteDance, Mr Zhang or TikTok and this reviewer hopes that at some point Mr Brennan either updates this book or writes a part 2. He has studied both the China internet businesses as well as ByteDance specifically for so long that his analysis would be better than that of other authors who will write on the subject.

This book is excellent not just because Mr Brennan has painstakingly charted out Mr Zhang’s journey as an entrepreneur and how each app he created came about. It is the author’s ability to lucidly explain developments in the US as well as China in terms of internet innovation and product launches and his exploration of why ByteDance succeeded with TikTok when it was not a pioneer in short videos that elevates it above being just a biography. In fact, Douyin was launched by Mr Zhang as a clone of Musical.ly almost two years later. (Douyin is TikTok in China. TikTok is the name for global markets). And yet, ByteDance managed to buy Musical.ly and Twitter shut down Vine. Even Instagram’s short videos was started before TikTok but never quite achieved the crazy fame of the latter.

Mr Zhang’s obsessions, his decision-making style, and his recognition that recommendation engines would overtake search and his clear ability to focus on the future are captured in this book. Though his personality is very different from the flamboyant tech billionaires in China, he has some things in common — including hiring young technology whizkids willing to follow the infamous 996 work style. (The 996 work style is changing and ByteDance has changed its work hours but employees have also ended up taking anywhere between a 17 and 20 per cent pay cut as a result.) Why Tencent failed to beat ByteDance is also analysed in great detail. Tencent was, as Mr Brennan points out, the victim of its own success because it never realised that a technology shift was under way.

Meanwhile, in China, things are rapidly evolving with President Xi Jinping’s government determined to discipline internet billionaires and regulate their companies. Both Jack Ma and Pony Ma have fallen afoul of the authorities it seems and a number of regulations have been brought in that will hobble them and their businesses. Mr Zhang and ByteDance, at the time of writing this review, seem to have dodged the bullet and some of the decisions will actually help it by allowing it to post its apps and content on other internet giant’s platforms.

Things change rapidly in the internet business and even more so in China. This is a great primer in a developing story and highly recommended.