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TikTok quickly became a top-five social media platform after it became available in the Western world in the late 2010s. It’s widely known as an app created in China by Zhang Yiming, who owns the company ByteDance. However, the story isn’t quite that simple.
Where Did TikTok Come From?
A different Chinese firm founded by Louis Yang Luyu and Alex Zhu actually got the ball rolling. Yang and Zhu launched an app devoted to music and video sharing in 2014 and called it musical.ly. One of the strategic choices they made was to focus on lip-sync content, which later became a TikTok standard.
Musical.ly grew quickly, soaring to number one in the App Store within a year and building more than 40 million users by the end of 2015. A year after that, there were 130 million Musical.ly users, and the company had partnered with industry giants like Apple Music, Viacom, and Hearst to dramatically expand musical and video content as well as online editing functions.
Everything seemed to be going well, but without warning in August 2017, it was announced that musical.ly had been acquired by Zhang Yiming’s ByteDance at a reported cost of one billion dollars.
The Birth of TikTok
ByteDance had been operating its own app, a somewhat similar video-sharing service called Douyin. Douyin served a Chinese user base, and ByteDance was getting ready to roll out a Western-centric version of the app named TikTok.
The company claims that it had originally decided to keep Musical.ly running as a separate and independent operation, but within a year or so, those plans changed; it became apparent to ByteDance that absorbing Musical.ly into TikTok would jumpstart the fledgling app’s user and content bases. The merger was finalized in August of 2018 and Musical.ly was shut down.
It wasn’t forgotten, though. Many of Musical.ly’s best and most popular features were added to the new interface, including personalized “For You” TikTok feeds, simple video capture and editing functions, filters and other creative tools, account verification, Duets, and page categories.
So, Who Made TikTok?
The combination of the two apps worked even better than anyone had expected, thanks in large part to Yang and Zhu’s Musical.ly userbase, content, and features which were integrated into the existing Douyin infrastructure. TikTok became America’s top app in 2018 and hasn’t looked back, now boasting more than two billion users.
It’s easy to say that Zhang “made” TikTok because he created the app based on his Douyin platform. Most observers believe, however, that the features that made TikTok so popular and important in the social media world should really be credited to Yang, Zhu, and musical.ly.
About the Author
Peter Hasselworth is a contributor at iDigic, sharing valuable insights about Instagram growth and social media marketing strategies.