Profile: Zhang Imin is a modest programmer from the province, who opened the tickto to the world

The story of how to turn someone else's project into the main youth social network of the world, maneuvering between reputation scandals and Chinese censorship.

In 2019, no entertainment application was talked about as often and loudly as about Chinese Tiktok. He won American, European and Asian teenagers with the same success, uniting them into a huge community within himself. Before that, no one succeeded, including Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

In the response for this, the 36-year-old head of BYTEDANCE Zhang Imin. Modest and non-public, he built an IT imperial in the era, when it seemed that this market had long been divided. Zhang stubbornly holds in the shade, while his company, maneuvering between reputation scandals and Chinese censorship, confidently conquers the international market through Tiktok and other projects.

Updated May 20: Zhang Imin will leave the post by the end of 2021. He will remain the chairman of the board of directors and focuses on the long -term strategy of the company, corporate culture and social responsibility. BYTEDANCE new director will be the co -founder of the company Liang Zubo

Zhang began work as a programmer, but lost his job due to Chinese censorship

In 1976, when one of the main figures of Chinese communism and the head of the PRC Mao Zedong died in Beijing, hardly anyone could confidently say how much this will affect the country's economic course. With his departure, large -scale liberalization of the economy slowly began , which allowed many residents to contact the technological business for the first time.

One of those who embarked on a new job was Zhang's father. He left the civil service in the field of science and opened in the industrial city of Dunguan, next to Hong Kong, a small electronics factory. This was also reflected in the children's interests of Zhang, born near the island Taiwan in the province of Fujian in 1983.

In 2001, the young man entered the University of Nankai. Initially, Zhang studied microelectronics, but a year later he switched to software engineering. In addition to studying, the student life of Zhang was almost completely consisted of coding and repairing computers of acquaintances. Once the part -time job paid off on the unusual side - Zhang began to meet, and later married a classmate, who asked to fix her computer.

Standard student entertainments like playing cards or drinking were not interested in Zhang. A restrained and modest, young man rarely went out without books, which were most often biographies of celebrities. “I read many biographies of great people. They can have a lot to draw a lot, ” said the entrepreneur.

With a diploma in the field of programming, a specialty that is still earning status, he was one of the first to get a job in Kuxun. She worked on the site of the same name to search for profitable air tickets. As Zhang was recognized later, one of his strengths was the ability to be interested not only in its zone of responsibility, coding, but also by the product itself.

Thinking about what the buyer needs, he added a function to the site that automatically notified users about profitable promotions, instead of expecting to find the right offer themselves. The idea took root, and Zhang realized that customers do not always know what they want.

The psychology of people worried Zhana further. For some time he worked in the Chinese branch of Microsoft, but soon left. He did not like that in a large corporation his work was too distant from people who use the final product.

In 2008, the programmer joined the Fanfou team, known for the Chinese Twitter of the same name. The companies were successful, the microblogging format took root perfectly, but in June 2009, unexpected-mass protests of the local population in the city of Urumchi due to the murders of the Chinese of the local population. It was there that the unrest was born, which in the future led to mass surveillance of local residents and their hard suppression .

Fanfou played the popularity against the application-due to the fact that many protesters coordinated their actions through it, the authorities intervened in the work of the company and demanded to close the project. The leadership obeyed . By coincidence, two months later, Sina Weibo launched - the microblogging service, which occupied the liberated market and became one of the main social networks of China.

Together with the leadership and employees of Fanfou, Zhang watched the new company entrenched in the field where he had worked intensely, and his contribution was lost. But suddenly a new prospect appeared in front of him: Kuxun, a small part of which he owned, was sold Tripadvisor, and Zhana relied on a share. A businessman has opened a business - BYTEDANCE.

Zhang before Google and Tencent realized that the future is behind algorithmic ribbons, having earned it on this

After blocking Google’s services in 2010 and the fight against Western IT services, a technological industry boom came to China. This market was divided by Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba, launching successful and profitable services and social networks. But they did not take into account the upcoming changes - the time of newspapers and desktop as the usual ways to read the news was rapidly ending, and they were replaced by smartphones and the technology of the smart tape.

Zhang was more insightful. He believed that, opening news sites, people often do not know what they are interested in reading. Therefore, it is necessary to assign this task to artificial intelligence, which, thanks to the algorithms, will offer each user only the content that corresponds to his interests.

However, when in 2012 the 29-year-old Zhang first came from the ideas of such an application and asked for money for the start, investors doubted that he would benefit where Tencent or Google had not yet done. “At first, from the founding of Bytedance, people often stopped paying attention to me and made a conversation with my colleagues immediately after we were introduced, because of my childish appearance,” the entrepreneur shared .

Problems with the search for investors were explained by the personal philosophy of Zhang. He strove for financial independence from Chinese IT giants, Tencent, Baidu or Alibaba, and wanted to find foreign investors. These searches led to the fact that the company did not have enough money to pay for an ordinary apartment in Beijing, where the team built an office.

“We huddled together on cheap furniture, but these were happy times. Every day it seemed encouraging, and, more importantly, we created something valuable, ” said Zhang. Sometimes they could hardly pay for the monthly rent of the apartment - 20 thousand yuan (about 183 thousand rubles).

In August 2012, Zhang nevertheless achieved his own-ByTedance launched the Toutiao news aggregator, which, based on algorithms, recommends each user the content that suits him. “The most important thing is that we do not work in the news business. We are more like a search business or social network, ” said the businessman in 2017, emphasizing that Toutiao does not have journalists or editors,“ we are engaged in innovation. We do not copy the grocery and technological ideas of American companies. ”

“Indeed, initially we did not relate to [Toutiao] seriously,” Tencent admitted anonymously anonymously. In the first year after the launch, the Zhang service became popular, offering Chinese users a fresh approach to the news. But faith did not come to success immediately.

In 2013, Google announced the closure of his RSS aggregator, who sent content to the subscribers on the basis of their preferences. Then Zhang, who rarely gives an interview and appearing in public, made an essay in WeChat (belongs to competitive Tencent) and announced that the problem is not in technology, but in Google's approach. The service turned out to be unfriendly, because people were forced to decide on their own what is interesting, instead of the algorithms for them, the businessman considered it .

In 2017, Toutiao used 120 million daily, and the total audience reached 600 million people. By this time, the top managers of the Asian branch of Microsoft and Uber China had pulled into the aggregator team.

Reality behind loud indicators looked like this: the main interest among Toutiao users was materials with provocative headings. As The Verge wrote , most of the content in Toutiao is little related to education.

According to the South China Morning Post, at a closed meeting, Zhang himself recognized this situation. In 2018, one of the investors asked why Toutiao and his analogues are fixated on social problems, gossip about celebrities and obscene jokes.

“Each time we conduct internal tests, the results show that the number of views of articles falls when applying alternative content like an international agenda, science or technology,” Zhang answered .

The success of Toutiao and the value of the BYTEDANCE value in 2017 showed $ 20 billion-Zhana managed to create a successful startup in the era when the Chinese IT market leads Baidu, Tencent and Alibaba. The entrepreneur did not plan to stop: soon the company created or ate another six projects. Among them are four platforms for creating entertaining short videos that have become a field of practice of the future.

Having created Tiktok, Zhang opened the company a unique road to the international audience, which the Chinese IT failed before

Thoughts about creating an application with short videos of Vital in ByTedance since 2014, but then the company was afraid that she could not compete with similar services from Tencent and Weibo. But these same fears were not stopped by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Alex Ju and Lia Yang, who created Musical.ly in the same year.

In this application, focused on adolescents, users recorded videos from 15 seconds to a minute. Next, they connected a record with songs or sounds, and also imposed filters and effects. For an accidental person, what was happening in Musical.ly looked like chaos, but the application quickly rose to the first position in the App Store, becoming the most loaded in the United States.

The authors dreamed of making a social network based on the video from the service - and it turned out. Interest in Musical.ly was shown by Disney, Apple, Facebook and Bytedance. Zhang went further and copied the concept of the application for its analogue called Duyin. It quickly crushed competitors in China while Musical.ly focused on the foreign audience.

Like all major IT films of China, Zhang dreamed to find the way to the Western audience. The most reasonable solution turned out to be the simplest - byTedance absorbed Musical.ly (the exact amount of the transaction was not disclosed, but varies in the area of ​​a billion dollars).

All 100 million active users of the application were transferred to a new service - Tiktok, while Duyin has not gone anywhere. ByTedance intentionally made two versions of one application (Chinese and international) to avoid violation of China's legislation. “Instead of focusing only on the domestic market, we went abroad,” Zhang recalled .

After the purchase of Musical.ly, BYTEDANCE has updated the application recommendations mechanism and added the opportunity to respond to the video. All this gave a sense of ownership and formed a community. According to the former employee of the company, a week after that, users began to stay 3% longer in the application - a great success in the industry, where 3% per year is considered a good indicator, noted in WSJ.

After the success of Tiktok, Zhang almost did not use the application. He explained that the social network “designed for youth”, but obliged the managers to upload their videos there. If someone’s videos did not gain enough “likes”, a guilty employee publicly pressed up.

The Instagram block is not available

Criticism came with success. Technological companies began to blame ByTedance of copying American innovations, including from Snapchat. By analogy with him, Tiktok really added a video that disappears after a certain period of time (as “history” on Instagram), as well as some editing functions and the principles of searching for new videos.

But the modernization of the heir to Musical.ly and competent copying of foreign innovations is not all that allowed Tiktok to become the most discussed application since 2018. According to WSJ, BYTEDANCE allocated a billion dollars for advertising for the service. YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, VKontakte - there is not a single major socialist left, wherever the Chinese application advertisement appeared.

At the height of the Tiktok campaign , even on the TNT channel, and in the very first months, official accounts appeared there at the Little Big group, rapper Timati, models Diana Melison, comedian Garik Kharlamov and video blogger Maryana Ro. The culmination of the advertising procession was advertising on Times Square on New Year's Eve. At the moment when thousands of people gathered on the street in anticipation, and dozens of television cameras broadcast the final counting until the end of 2018, the Tiktok logo appeared on an interactive billboard.

The end of 2018 was marked for Zhang for another reason for the celebration. In October, the cost of ByTedance was estimated at $ 75 billion, which made the company the most expensive startup in history.

For seven years, Zhang created a startup, which has been forgiven the status of the empire, where the main product is Tiktok

For many parents, Tiktok is perceived as annoying and harmful to children the application. “She talked with us only when she asked us to record a video for Tiktok with her,” said a 23-year-old resident of Indonesia Maulidia Yusliwan about a ten-year-old cousin.

Such complaints were not single: in July 2018, from the filing of the Ministry of Protection of Children and Women's Associations in Indonesia, Tiktok blocked for “pornography, blasphemy and obscene content”. A week later, the service announced the elimination of problems and achieved the locking.

The US government also relate to the growing influence of Tiktok. According to WSJ, American officials are discussing a possible threat of national security by the Chinese application. And the May decree of Donald Trump, who gives the government the authority to block the services of “foreign opponents” of the United States, and aimed at Huawei, can become a mechanism for influence on Bytedance in the future.

All seven years of BYTEDANCE work can more or less calmly work in the conditions of Chinese censorship, which is important for numerous foreign investors of the company. However, in April 2018, the company had to close the humorous application of Neihan Duanzi after complaints of the Chinese authorities.

The government calculated the content in the service, according to the concept of similar to Reddit, too obscene and offensive. Despite the audience of 17 million people and the friendly community within the application, Zhang, who probably did not forget about the censorship of Fanfou in 2009, publicly apologized that he had led the company on the “erroneous path”.

However, the closure of the application did not repel from Zhang the craving for experiments and rivalry. BYTEDANCE is considered a startup and can hardly compete with profit with Tencent or Baidu, but the media compare the company Zhang with the Empire. This is not surprising, given the spheres that Zhang plans to spread to.

• BYTEDANCE plans to enter the streaming market and acquired exclusive rights to films and television shows for its Xigua Video application. Its rivals in this field are IQIYI (one of the largest online platforms in the world), Tencent Video and Youku Tudou (belongs to Alibaba);
• In October 2018, ByTedance launched an online store in China for buying food, clothing, home and rest;
• In October 2018, the head of the Asia-Pacific region on Instagram left the position for the chair of the Global Policy Director in ByTedance. At the same time, for the sake of places in the Chinese startup, the leaders of the Indonisei and Japanese branches of Facebook left their posts;
  
• In November 2018, Bytedance concluded a partnership with NBA, allowing you to broadcast vivid moments, backstage events and recording matches in Tiktok and Toutiao;
• In January 2019, BYTEDANCE released a competitor WeChat, similar to the Snapchat Messenger Duoshan. In it, users can download and send each other short videos that disappear after 72 hours;
  
• In May 2019, it became known that ByTedance is developing its own smartphone. According to the media, the phone with the pre -installed applications of the company is Zhang's "old dream";
  
• In June 2019, the former top manager of Facebook and Yahoo Blake Canldi moved to ByTedance. In a Chinese company, he is engaged in the international promotion of Tiktok;
  
• In June 2019, WSJ reported that BYTEDANCE is interested in buying Snapchat, Twitter and the Quore online questioning site.
  

As for Tiktok, from the moment of launch it has turned from a collection of silly rollers to the concentration of a large community, every day inventing new entertainments and flash mobs. At the same time, the newspaper The New York Times, Tiktok was almost deprived of everything that is criticized by Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or other services - including aggressive environment, propaganda or content with elements of violence. In fact, this is not the case - according to the selfharm tag, you can find many publications related to the infliction of wounds.

The same opinion as NYT is adhered to by the reporter Michael Spencer, who called the Tiktok format, is much more “inspiring than the tiring tape of Instagram's“ Storystands ”. “In Tiktok, all, for the most part, just have fun. Пользователи живут моментом, или создают новый — чем страннее, тем лучше», — говорится в колонке The Verge на ту же тему.

Как писала WSJ, некоторые топ-менеджеры в IT-фирмах полагают, что TikTok постигнет судьба Vine — платформы коротких роликов, которая стремительно набрала аудиторию в 2013 году, но закрылась три года спустя. Но если Twitter, владеющий Vine, убедился в невозможности заработать на приложении, у TikTok не должно быть с этим проблем — рекламные блоки легко встроить в ленту.

Более того, Vine занимал нишевый рынок, а качественный контент там производило небольшое число пользователей. Тогда как авторы TikTok настроили алгоритмы так, чтобы они продвигали пользователям контент от разных людей. Параллельно с этим в TikTok перетягивают популярных звёзд. Как минимум одно соглашение с Инстаграм-знаменитостью, подразумевающее публикацию одного ролика в китайском сервисе, обошлось Bytedance в миллион долларов.

Масштабные рекламные затраты привели к тому, что по итогам 2018 года доход Bytedance впервые не превзошёл прогнозы и составил около 7,4 миллиарда долларов. Источники Bloomberg также объяснили это задержкой монетизации приложений и замедлением экономического роста в Китае. Однако в марте 2019 года состояние Чжана, начавшего компанию в тесной квартире, достигло 13 миллиардов долларов, а месячная аудитория пользователей приложений Bytedance превысила миллиард человек.

Но пока успехи и неудачи Bytedance описывают ведущие экономические издания, сам Чжан остаётся в тени. Он до сих пор почти не появляется на публике, а имя его жены — той, с которой бизнесмен познакомился ещё студентом в общежитии — вовсе не упоминается в СМИ. В июне 2019 года он отказался пообщаться с The Wall Street Journal: с американской бизнес-прессой он вообще толком никогда не говорил.

Возможно, своё самое большое «интервью» Чжан дал в 2016 перед выпускниками вузов, работающими в отделе продуктов в Toutiao. В большой речи он в основном говорил о молодости, и том, как использование её качеств, любопытства, оптимизма и недовольства посредственностью, ведут к успеху. А завершил выступление высказыванием о том, что порой стартапы могут предложить больше, чем корпорации.

Вы должны уметь рассуждать, какую специальность вы выбираете, какую компанию, какую профессию и какой путь. Эти выборы не должны быть краткосрочными. Многие люди хотели пойти в компании с иностранными инвестициями и не работать в стартапах. В 2007 году многие одноклассники спрашивали меня о выборе профессии, и я предложил им перейти в Baidu вместо IBM (крупный американский производитель ПО — прим. TJ) или Microsoft.

Но многие думали в краткосрочной перспективе: иностранные компании более известные и платят больше. Но я напомню вам правду, которую вы слышали много раз. Когда я закончил обучение, моя зарплата составляла от трёх до пяти тысяч юаней (от 27 тысяч до 45 тысяч рублей) в месяц, что, по правде говоря, ничтожно мало. Краткосрочная разница в оплате не важна. Однако немногие люди способны понять это и правильно рассудить.

Чжан Имин

Этот текст — часть редакционного проекта TJ о TikTok и том, как он влияет на сегодняшний интернет. Остальные статьи на эту тему можно найти по тегу ниже.

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