By KE Xiaobin

ByteDance is reorganizing into six business units: Dali Education, Douyin, Feishu, Nuverse, TikTok, and Volcano Engine.

As news service Toutiao vanishes into Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok will be responsible for the overall development of the domestic news feed business and will become the leading BU of ByteDance.

According to CNNIC, 720 million people in China access news through their phones, up 100 million in the past three years. But numbers are down this year and, once ByteDance’s flagship product, Toutiao has hit the rocks.

However, the short video industry is still doing very well, Douyin’s DAU has increased 20 times to 600 million since 2018.

As new functions appear on Douyin, ByteDance has made its way into local life, e-commerce, real estate, and medicine. The conglomerate’s revenue in 2020 topped 237 billion yuan (US$37 billion), up 111 percent compared with 2019. Douyin contributed nearly 60 percent of advertising income.

The integration of the three news feed platforms into one business unit will help ByteDance deal with the redundancy among employees and target advertising better. It also means an important user growth for Douyin as its DAU reportedly increased only 40 million from last year. Douyin is expected to become a more comprehensive platform.

Douyin aims to make one trillion yuan through e-commerce this year. More than 600 billion had been completed by August.