ByteDance, best known for the app Tik Tok, has launched a new service called “Duoshan” in a live-streamed event in Beijing. Duoshan lets its users send short-lived videos, GIFs, and images to each other. “Duoshan” is perfectly capable of giving some serious and tough competition to Tencent Holding Ltd.’s WeChat, and indeed many people see it that way. When it comes to dominating the Chinese social media platform, Tencent is among the top runners with their WeChat and QQ. WeChat claims to have one billion monthly active users worldwide, and QQ has 800 million MAUs.
With the Chinese New Year coming next month, Duoshan will certainly get its chance to hog the spotlight and dominate the digital payment area, which is considered to be a new age tradition among China’s netizens. The news of Bytedance’s release of Duoshan certainly has created hype among the tech enthusiasts in China, and it is one of the trending words on Weibo, which somewhat is like China’s substitute for Twitter. Words such as “social,” “waging a war”, and “Zhang Yiming,” who is the founder of Bytedance, are trending on Weibo.
Duoshan appears to be a mix of TikTok and Snap, a mix that makes it sound very appealing to the Millennials. However, one point of difference between Duoshan and TikTok is that whereas using TikTok, users can follow celebrities and strangers alike, Duoshan is specifically built for private messaging. Like other video-sharing apps of our time, Duoshan also comes with a number selections of special effects and filters. The videos that had been shared or sent from one user to another will disappear after 72 hours.
We are seeing more and more Douyin users share their videos through other social media platforms and channels. With the launch of Duoshan, we are creating our first video-based social messaging app to allow users to share their creativity and interact directly with their family and friends – Zhang Nan, President, Douyin, (also known as TikTok)
Chen Lin, the newly appointed chief operating officer of ByteDance’s news app Jinri Toutiao hopes that WeChat does not consider Duoshan to be a competition. He said in a statement today, “What they do in essence is to build an ‘infrastructure’. We, on the other hand, is only going after people who are closest to you.”
