TikTok’s Owner Made Over $7 Billion in Revenue in the First Half of 2019 Alone

TikTok is either a fun video-sharing app for youngsters or an annoying fad for adults.

Regardless of how you view the platform, however, it remains a huge revenue source for its parent company ByteDance.

Reuters reported that TikTok, its Chinese version Douyin, and news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, have raked in a combined total of 50-60 billion yuan ($7 billion to $8.4 billion) for the company’s revenue in the first half of this year.

ByteDance, which is currently one of the world’s most valuable unicorns, is also said to be pretty confident of making a profit in the second half of the year. It should be noted that the company has yet to make a public announcement that would verify such claims.

The Beijing-based startup reportedly revised its revenue target for 2019 from 100 billion yuan ($14 billion) to 120 billion yuan ($16.7 billion) due to the unexpected growth. The figures are indeed a huge leap considering ByteDance’s revenue was $7.2 billion for the entirety of 2018, according to The Information (via CNBC).

Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index ranks ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming at number 103 among the world’s 500 richest people with a net worth of $13 billion.

ByteDance currently boasts 1.5 billion monthly active users and 700 million daily active users across all its apps. According to sources, while TikTok is still in the early stages of earning revenue, Douyin has generated a significant amount in advertising fees in China.

ByteDance has recently launched its own search engine, a work efficiency app and a Wikipedia-like website called Baike.com. It has also set its sights in creating its own music-streaming app.

Valued by several sources at $78 billion last year, the seven-year-old startup is eyeing further expansion outside China. It has also increased its employees from 40,000 last year to around 50,000 in its bid to go global.

Feature Image via Forbes (Toutiao)

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