China's TikTok, which has taken the world by storm, is working its magic in its home nation, too.
中国的抖音已风靡全球,在国内也很火爆。
The Chinese version of TikTok, called Douyin, hasamassed 400 million daily active users, parentcompany ByteDance revealed in its annual report thisweek (in Chinese). This is an impressive growth forthe addictive video app, which had 250 million dailyactive users in January last year. (A ByteDancespokesperson confirmed the figures to TechCrunch.)
The report, which describes the user behavior and trends, illustrates the cultural differencebetween China and the U.S., said Katherine Wu, an investor at New York-based firm NotationCapital .
"Things that trend in these two countries are insanely different. For example: knowledge-basedcontent is extremely popular in China, and less so in the U.S. Also, this was wild to me: thosecreators that did the most dance videos in China are users born in the 60s (!!), whereas in theUS, it seems that it's mostly teenagers who are creating the dances," she wrote.
ByteDance claimed that Douyin has established itself as the largest knowledge, culture and artplatform in China. (Douyin is only available in mainland China.) Indeed, 14.89 million "knowledge-based content videos" were shared on the app last year, it claimed.
Citing an example, one of the world's most valued startups claimed that one user alone whoposts videos about chemistry reached 130 million people last year. On the art and culture front, videos that revolved around those topics had 543.1 billion plays on Douyin last year, it claimed. (TechCrunch was not able to independently verify the authenticity of the claims.)
Education has become a crucial use case for ByteDance. TikTok, which is estimated to haveclocked more than $50 million in revenue last year, already counts educational content as one ofthe most consumed categories on its app across the world. The app launched an educationalcampaign in India last year, where it has amassed more than 200 million users.