According to Statista, the digital media market is expected to grow from $38.06 billion in 2018 to $42.56 billion by the year 2022. Recently, Chinese content aggregator ByteDance shot into prominence with its acquisition announcement. The Billion Dollar Unicorn club member is also expected to list this year.

ByteDance’s Offerings

Beijing-based ByteDance was founded by former software engineer Zhang Yiming in 2012. ByteDance was founded in 2012 as Yiming saw an opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence and mobile Internet to revolutionize the way people consume and receive information. It is working on building a platform that will not only deliver information, but also serve as a creative hub to host and promote creators.

ByteDance’s key offering is its flagship product Toutiao, which is the largest content discovery and creation platform in China. It is a news aggregator site that uses machine learning to personalize news recommendations. It integrates relevant content for users based on the learning it gathers through analysis on data obtained from the user’s location, smartphone model, and click history. Toutiao boasts of more than 120 million daily active users in China, who spend an average of 74 minutes per day on the service.

While Toutiao is a China-focused app, ByteDance also has an international market app called TopBuzz. Similar to Toutiao, TopBuzz predicts what the user will be interested in and uses a clickbait model to attract the user into clicking on other content.

Bytdance’s Acquisitions

More recently, ByteDance was in the news for its acquisition of Musical.ly. Musical.ly is a video sharing app with over 100 million users worldwide. It was founded nearly three years ago in China itself. The app is very popular among teens who use the app to share videos of themselves lip-syncing to songs. Users can also live stream themselves while doing so. The acquisition is expected to cost ByteDance $1 billion.