TikTok Actually Manages but Who Decides?
June 22, 2020
TikTok’s older sibling TopBuzz has not been nearly as successful as the wildly popular (though problematic) short-video app, but it held its own for a while. The product, launched in 2015, recommended AI-personalized news articles to subscribers around the world. However, reports Reuters, “TikTok Owner ByteDance Shuts Down Overseas News Aggregator TopBuzz.” Writers Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh tells us:
“The closure of TopBuzz underlines how ByteDance’s moves into international markets have not been entirely smooth in spite of TikTok’s success. … TopBuzz’s downloads declined to 1.2 million in the first half of 2019 from 7 million in all of 2018 on the App Store and Google Play combined, according to researcher Sensor Tower. TikTok had 345.2 million downloads in the first half of 2019. TopBuzz began shrinking its operations last year, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The app used to have operations in multiple languages including Spanish and Portuguese, one of the sources said. But now its website only shows English and Japanese versions.”
But why the decline? Perhaps this has something to do with it—the write-up continues:
“ByteDance is currently under a U.S national security inquiry into TikTok’s handling of user data, and also facing tightened scrutiny from regulators around the world.”
There is a global news app, however, that is still going strong in China. Last month News Break, founded by former Yahooer Zheng Zhaohui and funded by Chinese investors, outperformed both Twitter and Reddit on Google Play according to SimilarWeb.
ByteDance was founded in 2012 and is based in Shanghai, China.
Cynthia Murrell, June 22, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
