Prominent Chinese media commentator Qin Shuo has called on ByteDance to take greater responsibility for creating social value, saying China’s internet has shifted from the WeChat era to ByteDance’s “Douyin and Hongguo era”.
Douyin Group vice-president Li Liang has countered Qin’s “ByteDance era” claim, calling it “utter nonsense”.
Qin, founder of China Business News, published an article titled “The alarming rise of Hongguo and the ByteDance era of China’s internet” (《可怕的红果与中国互联网的字节时间》) on his WeChat public account on Monday (26 October).
The article cited Nomura’s China Internet and New Media (《中国互联网与新媒体》) report, which found that in July this year, Douyin overtook WeChat for the first time in its share of time users spent on China’s top 50 mobile internet apps in total. Douyin accounted for 19.4% of time spent, WeChat 18.8%, and ByteDance 40.9% across all its apps.
ByteDance’s free short-drama app Hongguo reached 168 million daily active users, exceeding the combined total of the four major long-form video platforms: Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku and Mango TV. Average daily usage time was about 125 minutes for Hongguo and 112 to 120 minutes for Douyin, both exceeding the 82 to 85 minutes recorded by Tencent’s WeChat.
Qin said the 125 minutes that Hongguo users spend on the app each day may be good for ByteDance, but hardly so for users and society as a whole. The price of that “feel-good rush” is high, and its effects will linger. He called on ByteDance to take greater responsibility with its powerful stream of content to create social value and offset social cost.
Douyin’s Li, in a Weibo post on Tuesday (27 October), said Hongguo’s steady improvement of content quality is one reason for the increasing take-up, but to term this as “the ByteDance era of China’s internet” was unwarranted.
He noted that Tencent’s short-drama and short-video businesses were actually growing far faster than Douyin and Hongguo. Without calling Qin by name, he said “this scholar’s claim of a so-called ‘XX era for China’s internet’ is wildly exaggerated, lacks rigour, does not reflect the facts and will not stand the test of time. In fact, it is not consistent with his usual style either”.
In response to Li’s comments, Qin cited the Nomura report once again on Wednesday (28 October), saying that Tencent apps accounted for 28.6% of the time Chinese users spent on the top 50 apps by usage time, compared with 41.8% for ByteDance — a gap of 13.2 percentage points.
Qin said mobile internet usage in China was spread across many apps, including those of ByteDance, Tencent, Taobao and Tmall Group, Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu. But ByteDance apps accounted for more than 40% of total usage time, making both its share and the trend clear. “The ByteDance era of China’s internet” summed up this phenomenon, he said, describing it as “a very clear fact”.
Qin added, “The readiness of a spokesperson for Douyin, a content company, to resort to nasty language also makes me more wary of the underlying character of the content produced by the company he represents.”
Qin is not alone in his view on ByteDance dominance. Wu Xiaobo Channel, another major independent financial media outlet, published an article on Wednesday (28 October) titled “Behind Zhang Yiming’s return to the top of the rich list, China’s internet enters the ‘ByteDance era’” (《张一鸣再成首富背后，是中国互联网进入“字节时间”》). Zhang is the founder of ByteDance.
The article said ByteDance excels at using algorithms to capture user attention. Its Douyin app has cemented its position as a mass-market app in China, while its overseas short-video platform TikTok has seen a steady rise in the share of revenue generated abroad. Its artificial intelligence assistant Doubao also has a leading mobile user base in China.
