January 2020 – IH Digital is now able to support Toutiao and TikTok ads with our expanded digital advertising services. We are now an official sales partner of Bytedance in Southeast Asia, allowing us to support brands across the region for their online advertising campaigns. Our new advertising capabilities will help regional clients to easily and quickly get started with advertising on ByteDance’s key platforms such as TikTok (Musical.ly), Douyin, Toutiao, XiGua, HuoShan, and NewsRepublic.

Who is ByteDance?

ByteDance is a Beijing-based internet technology company founded by Zhang Yiming in 2012. It offers many online products catering to a wide set of audiences from across the globe. Its core product is TouTiao – a news and information content platform and one of China’s largest mobile platforms for content creation, aggregation and distribution reinforced by machine learning techniques. It also owns the short video app Douyin, which later became the Chinese version of TikTok when the Chinese social media giant acquired the lip-syncing app Musical.ly in Q4 2017.

Impact on the Digital Advertising Industry

ByteDance is reported to have 1.5 billion monthly active users (MAU) with 700 million daily active users (DAU) as of October 2019, which is an increase of 50% compared to its January 2018 user base. According to self-media account Kaiqi, its revenue reached around RMB 48 billion in Q1 2019, with RMB 20 billion from Douyin. The online company is seemingly closer to realise its 2019 revenue goal of RMB 100 billion considering its rapid user base growth. Moreover, ByteDance-owned short video app TikTok has 1.65 billion downloads on iOS and Android in January 2020 – a significant growth from 663 million in 2018. Out of the total downloads, 190 million app installs (11.5%) are from Southeast Asia. The app’s download surge outdid Instagram’s 444 million downloads in 2018 and is catching up with Facebook’s 711 million in the same year, as CNET reports. This resulted in both Douyin and TikTok being the world’s second most downloaded apps in 2019.

More Advertising Opportunities for SEA Brands

With ByteDance’s rapid user base growth in mind, more digital marketers turn into advertising on its key products namely Douyin, TikTok and Toutiao to reach a wider set of audiences in Southeast Asia and Greater China. With this amplified partnership, IH Digital through ATC can now provide support to marketers exploring this opportunity. Here is a list of ByteDance advertising platforms we now support through this partnership:

SEA Digital Marketing

1. TikTok – Available in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
2. NewsRepublic – A news app powered by artificial intelligence that provides readers with the latest world and local news, viral headlines, trending videos, and articles directly to the user’s phone. Available in Taiwan only.

China Digital Marketing

1. Douyin (抖音) – More than half of its users are aged 30 years and below.
2. TouTiao (今日头条) – Over 70% of its users are aged between 25 to 45 years.
3. XiGua (西瓜视频) – A video recommendation platform that runs videos a couple of minutes longer than videos in Douyin. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) to suggest quality and related content based on the user’s interest. Over 70% of its users are aged 30 years and below.
4. Huoshan (火山小视频) – A video-shooting application where users can quickly get content, show themselves, and gain fans by recording videos for up to 15 seconds. More than 70% of its users are aged between 25 to 40 years.

Let us help you explore TikTok ads and more for your brand!

Get started with TikTok ads! IH Digital is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Singapore, with presence across multiple countries in Southeast Asia and Greater China. With our media partnerships, we have helped many regional companies ultimately boost their online advertising campaigns on many platforms. Know more about our digital advertising services by dropping us a message here. IH Digital, IH Singapore, and Digital 38 are members of the IH Digital Group.