Just two days ago, one of the most popular growing app China “Douyin/Tiktok” (owned by ByteDance, formerly known as Toutiao) was founded to be blocked to login with WeChat (owned by Tencent) for new users.
The two old king in social apps is fighting the rising new star.
In March 2018, WeChat global MAUs surpassed 1 billion.
Douyin said its global MAUs is over 500 million in July 2018.
Tencent’s WeChat has been on the market way earlier (since 2011). Douyin was launched in Sep 2016 but its growth has been so terrifying that Tencent has adopted several defensive actions, including blocking sharing Douyin links in WeChat.
Tencent has also backed Qutoutiao to combat with Jinri Toutiao (Toutiao’s flagship and first product) and Weishi for Douyin.
Now the war has escalated. Toutiao launched a new social app “Duoshan” to challenge the King and Tencent blocked WeChat login for Douyin.
Things are just getting started. But it reminded me of the 3Q war in 2010 between Tencent and Qihu360. Tencent didn’t have WeChat yet and relied on its QQ platform (the previous King).
During the war, one particular action by Qihu was seen by Pony Ma (Tencent founder and CEO) as the most threatening and he forced users to log off QQ if they don’t uninstall Qihu.
The key in that situation and in Ma’s mind is the copy of social map. The full connections between almost every relevent Chinese internet user.
This is probably what Ma values most and is one of Tencent’s core secrets.
That is what Toutiao is trying to obtain with Duoshan and Douyin today ina different way than Qihu) – the social map of almost every relevant Chinese (young) mobile users. And those would be the future Chinese internet revenue sources/assets/reserves.
The war will continue to unfold and Toutiao is much more powerful than Qihu. Toutiao is one of the most valued private companies in the world, but it is also taking on Baidu for news feeds and ads – multi-battleground just like Uber.