Introducing Douyin, China’s incredibly sticky short video app
Developed in just 200 days, Douyin (Tik Tok in the US) was the most downloaded iPhone app in the world for the first quarter of 2018. Our guest writer is Mossy Wittenberg, a Schwarzman Scholar based in Beijing. He will report regularly on China Tech for the Monday Note.
Zihao Zhang, a classmate of mine at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has over 100,000 followers on Douyin, China’s wildly popular short video app. His most successful upload — a fifteen second clip of him practicing calligraphy — has been viewed more than two million times. It might take years to grow this sort of following on YouTube, but Zihao downloaded Douyin just over a month ago.
Douyin has itself enjoyed a similarly meteoric rise in popularity. Launched at the tail end of 2016 and allegedly built in just 200 days, it was the most downloaded non-gaming iOS app for the first quarter of this year. According to research by Jiguang, 14% of China’s 670 million smartphone users now have it on their devices.
Douyin is driven by a powerful recommendation algorithm that learns users’ interests from their viewing habits. It is possible to link accounts on other social media platforms but Douyin is not primarily a social tool — connections and follows serve mostly as data points for the algorithm. Its recommendations are so compelling that in April, developers were forced to add an “anti-addiction” notification that pops up after 90 minutes of continuous use. I haven’t found Douyin’s average daily use figures but the 120 million active users of its sister product Toutiao average 74 minutes a day on that platform.
Douyin’s content and overall concept are closely similar to Musical.ly, which the app’s parent company Bytedance bought last year for US $1 billion. The videos cover a range of topics but almost all are short and have musical backing, and many feature special effects, like filters and boomerang, from the app’s built-in editing tools.
When a new user opens the app, the initial hundred videos they’re shown are more or less standardised. This is the first round of training for the algorithm. Once it has gauged a user’s preferences it feeds them material from its vast store of user-generated content, which is syndicated between all of Bytedance’s products: Zihao was surprised when he set up an account on another Bytedance product to find he already had thousands of followers.
Bursting the Beijing bubble
Unlike rival KuaiShou, backed by Tencent, Bytedance segments its products according to target audience. It has a number of video sharing platforms — XiGua (“Watermelon”), Jinri Toutiao (“Daily Headlines”) and HuoShan (“Volcano”), to name a few — each designed for a slightly different demographic. Douyin is pitched at the most digitally engaged part of the market: students and white collar workers in top tier cities. But the app’s break came in February when, in the world’s largest human migration, China’s urbanites return home to towns and small cities for the New Year holiday. Douyin was a welcome diversion from days of mind numbing family time.
So the app is no longer limited to city dwellers, and it’s not just popular with the younger generation any more either: Zihao told me that last week he was recommended a video featuring the mother of an ex-colleague — and that earlier today he came across a post in which a man shows off an ID card verifying his one hundred and ten years of age.
Fifteen seconds of fame
Zihao (his handle is zihaoz) first hit it big with a video in which he flips through his Tsinghua student ID booklet to reveal his headshot. Tsinghua, “China’s MIT,” is a huge pull for Chinese audiences. It’s the country’s top university and, unlike elite institutions abroad, feels like it might just be attainable even to kids from small cities or lower income families. But Tsinghua students are supposed to be nerds, not heartthrobs. The Tsinghua ID and the good looking photo was an irresistible incongruity. Zihao says he gets hundreds of messages about applying to the university — interest he could monetise if he wanted to.
Zihao admits he can’t credit the boom in followership entirely to his looks. Douyin deliberately facilitates exponential audience growth, to ensure that good content reaches viewers as quickly as possible. In fact there’s something quite radical about just how easily new users can reach a vast audience.
Douyin’s algorithm shares first-timer videos with a small sample audience — say, 5 people — and measures their reaction. If they comment, like, or simply wait out the full clip (which is limited to fifteen seconds maximum for new producers), it records their approval. If a new producer is a hit with this first sample then their video is shared again, this time to a group several times larger than the first. The process is repeated and if users continue to like the content, it quickly finds its way to thousands of viewers.
Promoting gangster attitudes
Of course, like all media in China, there is censorship on Douyin. In one of his most recent uploads Zihao slid down a copy of The Economist, with a picture of Trump on the cover, to reveal the title of his thesis. The clip got 1,000 views and 100 likes in under a minute; sixty seconds later, Zihao was notified that it had been taken down. A new version, using a blank sheet of paper for the reveal, was left alone, so Douyin’s review system seems to have flagged the Trump image as political speech.
Bytedance employs thousands of content auditors, but the takedown happened so quickly that it seems more likely to have been picked up by an automatic detection system. Another clue to the sophistication of Douyin’s image processing is the comments left on the revised version of the video. Zihao’s topic was Baoji, a small city in Shaanxi province. The city’s name is in the paper’s title but Zihao didn’t include it in any metadata. Nonetheless comments quickly poured in from Baoji residents excited to see their city featured in a Tsinghua thesis.
In a bizarre twist, Douyin allegedly banned searches for Peppa Pig earlier this month, on the basis that she had become an icon for “society people” who “run counter to the mainstream values and are usually poorly educated with no stable job.” But the truth of the ban has been disputed and plenty of Peppa content remains on the platform.
Douyin’s success has come at a difficult moment for Bytedance. In early April the company’s flagship platform Toutiao was removed from Chinese app stores for three weeks by the country’s internet regulator. A day later another Bytedance product, Neihan Duanzi, a video and joke sharing platform with a furiously loyal fan base, was shut down—the first time the authorities have forced an app of its scale to close. The stated reason was a problem with “vulgar” content, though the real issue may have been that Duanzi users were using the app to organise real world events.
In an abject apology clearly drafted with the authorities in mind, Bytedance’s 34 year old CEO explained that content had spread on his company’s platforms “that was incommensurate with socialist core values, that did not properly implement public opinion guidance.” “Public opinion guidance” is buzzword dating to the Tiananmen Protests, synonymous with State information control.
The sporadic nature of regulatory actions over the last few years suggests that Beijing — like Washington — is still deciding its approach to social media giants. But any platform that can turn a twenty-something student into a minor celebrity in barely a month is likely to get some scrutiny, even if it’s mostly a repository for cute pets videos and beauty tips.
—M.W.
Mossy Wittenberg (mossywitt@gmail.com) is a Schwarzman Scholar based in Beijing. He has a background in digital media start-ups and recently submitted a Master’s thesis on self-media, fake news and regulation in China.
