TikTok’s Parent Company Set For a Metaverse Showdown Against Facebook

ByteDance, the company behind the trending short videos application, TikTok is working towards challenging Zukerburg’s Meta Universe in the up-and-coming metaverse industry. According to an announcement from ByteDance earlier this month, the company has begun to establish manifold changes, starting from laying down formal structures that will distinguish categories of employees based on their departments. This restructure came as an attempt to gain global recognition in other arenas after achieving exceptional success with TikTok.

Is ByteDance Following Facebook’s former growth strategy to Replace it?

While TikTok has established its dominance in the short video applications sphere, however, ByteDance has greater ambitions, one of which is to overpower former Facebook, and now Meta platform and take its place on the throne of Web3. ByteDance plans to continue building upon TikTok’s revenue-generating capabilities, and at the same time, use that success to expand into the Western markets with a broader suite of apps and services. One could speculate that ByteDance is following Facebook’s growth strategy of setting up the base with one core application, exactly like Facebook did in the early 2000s. Later on, using the revenue gains and market confidence from that one app to further branch out, which is similar to what Facebook did by acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram, along with becoming a single sign-in source for other services.

“ByteDance’s overseas layout is not only limited to the short video industry, but also includes some upstream news and music platforms…ByteDance has great ambitions for the overseas markets, and its competition with Facebook has become more apparent.”, Ashley Dudarenok, a China marketing expert and founder of digital marketing agencies Alarice and ChoZan told Wired.

When it comes to TikTok’s success there is no doubt that the application has outperformed itself despite backlash from Chinese regulators. Last month, the viral short video application entered the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market with the launch of its first-ever NFT series “TikTok Top Moments”. The series immediately gained a positive response from the community and became a big hit. It will be exciting to see what is next on TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance’s checklist.