On Apr 30, 2019, Tik Tok relisted in Indian Google Play and App Store. Tik Tok, is the short-video sharing platform made by ByteDance.
Tik Tok, the international version of Douyin. Photo: Credit to ByteDance
On Apr 30, 2019, Tik Tok relisted in Indian Google Play and App Store. Tik Tok, is the short-video sharing platform made by ByteDance. On Apr 17, 2019, Indian government asked Apple and Google to remove Tik Tok because of the inappropriate cotents. On Apr 24, 2019, Indian Madras High Court canceled the previous order to ban Tik Tok. According to the people who's in charge of Tik Tok, currently, this company has hired almost 500 employees and is planning to expand the team scale in the future to provide more localized services to the Indians.
According to Tik Tok Indian, since Jul 2018, Tik Tok has deleted more than 6 million short videos that broke the user agreements and the rule of Tik Tok community. Meanwhile, Tik Tok Indian team is actively communicating with the related departments, and is confident to Indian's information technology rules. In the future, Tik Tok will continue to strengthen its technology methods and contents examining to better the Indian users' experiences. Tik Tok is not the only company that have troubles in India. WhatsApp and Facebook, which regard India as its largest overseas market, has been under the supervise pressures for a long time.
Tik Tok is a totally international APP. Since the end of 2018, ByteDance isolated the Tik Tok totally from Douyin, which is the Chinese version of Tik Tok, in order to be more specific to the local market. The data of Tik Tok is stored in the third-party server in overseas, and the Tik Tok's examine and operating employees are completely separate with Douyin. Currently, Tik Tok is a totally independent products of ByteDance, which is similar with Douyin and Toutiao.
Going abroad is one of Tik Tok's core strategies. ,ZHANG Yiming (张一鸣), the founder and CEO of ByteDance, keeps saying that the ratio of ByteDance's overseas users should be more than 50%. According to AppAnnie, which is a third-party market analysis institution, Tik Tok has covered more than 150 countries and areas in the world, and ranks in a leading position in more than 40 countries' App stores. Currently, Tik Tok is the short video APP with a fastest increasing speed. 3 months after Tik Tok’s entering Japan's market, it ranked 1st in the Japanese App Store. In Japan, Tik Tok aims to provide similar products with Douyin, but the contents and operations of Tik Tok Japan should be 100% localized. In order to provide more local contents, Tik Tok cooperated with lots of local institutions of Japan. For example, Tik Tok cooperated with Avex, which is a Japanese entertainment magnate, to open the using rights of 25 thousand songs for Asian users. In 2018, Tik Tok created more than 280 challenge shows while most of them used Japanese popular music.
In Dec 2018, Tik Tok ranked 1st in Indian Play Store, and exceeded WhatsApp, which ranked 1st in 2017. Indian users occupied 39% of the Tik Tok's 500 million global users. In a nutshell, India is the largest overseas market of Tik Tok. With the further promotion of the Belt and Road policy, companies such as ByteDance will pay further attentions to the overseas market and provide more localized products.