ByteDance To Expand Its Business Past TikTok's Short Video Service
ByteDance Ltd., the company that owns TikTok, seems to be gearing up its popular short-video service app to expand its business ventures beyond what the app normally offers.
The company has recently utilised its short videos service for more than just entertainment. TikTok Resumes, ByteDance's pilot program for job seekers, was officially launched on 7 July 2021. Much like job finding sites like JobStreet and Indeed, TikTok Resumes allows people to submit job applications to employers, but instead of uploading a resume, you'll have to upload a short video resume a la regular TikTok video.
Bloomberg's Tae Kim mentioned that due to the launch of TikTok Resumes, it is safe to assume that ByteDance wants to focus on live streaming social commerce through TikTok. According to Kim's report, he was able to find more than 100 openings with "e-commerce" in the title and almost 90 for the word "live." He then said that TikTok is planning to "invest aggressively to cultivate live-streaming creators in numerous categories... and empower them to sell merchandise directly on the platform."
Additionally, TikTok has an experimental farming simulator mini-game on its user profiles, which could mean that ByteDance might be looking to expand its business to include video games in the future, much like Netflix. However, unlike Netflix's growth, TikTok is thriving as ByteDance wants to keep on growing TikTok as a business asset for business expansion. Sensor Tower, a company that provides market intelligence, said that TikTok has continued growing even during 2020 and despite multiple threats of government bans.
Despite its removal from its largest market India, it is now the first Non-Facebook mobile app to reach 3 billion downloads worldwide and the most downloaded and highest-grossing non-game app globally in the first half of 2021 - a success other popular apps like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram want to emulate by adding similar features into their platforms. YouTube, for its part, has recently added a feature called Shorts, a new way for content creators to express themselves in 15 seconds or less. The new feature seems to have replaced YouTube Stories, an app-only feature that presents short videos much like TikTok.
To stay ahead of the pack, however, Sensor Tower said that ByteDance has to "continue to innovate and build out [TikTok's] creator eco-system." With its current growth and ambitions to expand its business, ByteDance, through TikTok, may be in a position to create a super-app for the Western world, as Bloomberg puts it.