Bytedance ‘mulls offering’ next year

Beijing Bytedance Technology Co Ltd, which runs news aggregator Toutiao and short video app Douyin, is seeking a public listing next year, the Financial Times reported citing anonymous sources.

It remains unclear where the tech startup plans to list its shares or how much it intends to raise. Bytedance declined to comment when contacted by China Daily on Tuesday.

Founded in 2012, Bytedance has quickly grown into a media conglomerate encompassing news offerings, video products, and a Q&A forum that allows its more than 1 billion active users to communicate on a variety of heated issues.

Equally impressive, it is the only major Chinese tech startup that has not publicly announced investment from either of China’s two tech behemoths, Tencent Holdings Ltd and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, which take fast-rising services into their orbit and fight for supremacy in the zero-sum internet sphere in China.

The company is best known for employing artificial intelligence to filter and tailor information to people’s preferences to get users “hooked”. For instance, users spend on average 49 minutes daily on a variety of 15-second videos, according to consultancy Analysys.

Apart from challenging traditional media outlets, its meteoric rise is stealing the thunder of Tencent’s WeChat, through which users can make video conference calls, pay for taxi rides and order food on a daily basis.

Douyin is riding the monetization boom of the short video market, a sector projected by iResearch to surpass 35.7 billion yuan ($5.22 billion) by 2020. It’s becoming the latest avenue for brand promotion and online engagement with customers, posing a threat to longtime guru Taobao, an e-commerce marketplace run by Alibaba.

“Apparently you can see a strong social aspect to shortvideo apps,” said Ma Shicong, an entertainment analyst at Analysys. “They present a new medium for online expression and interaction.”