David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup and all vetted. Thousands and thousands of censors employed by the company to make sure that that aggregated content going to users is vetted. Yeah. Talk about emote here and a super easily accessible adjacent market for Toutiao and ByteDance to get into is pure short-form video. They’re seeing the super success on Musical.ly in the West. Now, ByteDance has always talked about having aspirations of expanding beyond the Chinese market and being one of the first of the new generation of Chinese internet companies that is going to be a global company. They see what’s going on with Musical.ly and they say, “Okay, this is the perfect Instagram stories, be a copier and fast-follow model for us here.” The other reason why this is appealing to them is, we talked a minute ago about monetization models in China and advertising versus direct monetization. ByteDance has direct monetization and is capable of that within their products as well. But they’re also the first company that’s really starting to crack the advertising market in China. Again, it gets back to this super sophisticated algorithm which gets to know users’ preference. Just like Facebook advertising where they know you so well, they can recommend content to you, they can also recommend ads to you. Arguable I would say with Facebook, it’s better recommending ad content than it is at organic content because so much of the way in the algorithm is who you know and who you follow as opposed to Toutiao and ByteDance. ByteDance over the past couple of years has been turning this algorithm into advertising, too, and they’re really starting to build for the first time, a digital advertising market in China. Yeah, and what’s important to know here is they launched Douyin that’s going swimmingly in China. Musical.ly frankly is scared at this point because they’re like, “Okay we sat around and missed China for too long. Now, we’re probably going to get beat there.” But similarly, Douyin is launched as TikTok in the US. It does not go well in the US. Musical.ly got this passionate, large, organically-built user base. Again, I think it’s easy to gloss over the importance of feeling like it’s a native app for your country. There’s not a lot of people using WeChat in the US. Certainly the Chinese version doesn’t feel like it’s for people in the US because it’s not, and the American version is so stripped down that it doesn’t feel right either, but Musical.ly really did. That’s a huge piece of that through the Sta. Monica office. TikTok versus Musical.ly in the US to the extent that you want to win this market, at least so far going to be Musical.ly.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.