Riding the domestic momentum of Douyin, ByteDance launched an international variant named TikTok in September 2017. Initial expansion targeted Asian markets including Thailand, Indonesia, and Japan. Despite strong localization efforts, breaking into North America and Western Europe remained a massive hurdle. Western users already had entrenched habits on Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
Zhang Yiming solved the distribution dilemma with capital. In November 2017, ByteDance reached an agreement to acquire Musical.ly, a Shanghai- and California-based lip-syncing app co-founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. Valued at roughly $800 million to $1 billion, Musical.ly had already built a loyal audience of roughly 60 million monthly active users, primarily American teenagers.
ByteDance initially ran Musical.ly and TikTok as separate services throughout late 2017 and early 2018. Behind the scenes, engineers spent months rebuilding Musical.ly’s backend infrastructure, preparing to replace its social-graph mechanics with ByteDance’s recommendation engine.
