As a middle-age restaurant owner who was neither interested in scrolling through viral videos nor likely to create such videos herself, Zhou Meiying never found a lot of use for Douyin, China’s most popular short-form video app. That changed last year, when the Chinese government shuttered Beijing’s restaurants to combat Covid-19. Zhou, 44, began streaming videos of herself preparing her specialty, braised pork knuckles, along with a link that allowed viewers to place orders for delivery. She now gets hundreds of orders each day through the app. “If it weren’t for Douyin, I wouldn’t even be able to pay salaries,” Zhou says. “It’s a new leg we stand on. That’s how we survived.”
The formula is a big deal for Zhou, and a significant development for ByteDance Ltd., the company that runs both Douyin and TikTok, which is available only outside China. ByteDance has primarily focused its operations on its social media apps, with most of its $80 billion annual revenue coming from what they generate in advertising. Last year it began offering food and grocery delivery in big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. When Douyin shows a user, say, a cheeseburger or a slushy, it includes a link to place a delivery order or a coupon that can be redeemed in person. Users can also search for cinemas, bars and beauty salons inside the app.
The so-called everything app model is popular in China thanks to WeChat, which incorporates elements of WhatsApp, Instagram, PayPal and other services into a single service. None of WeChat’s rivals have come close to providing such a sprawling range, but the success of Douyin’s food delivery experiment raises the possibility that ByteDance could become the first.
