The shock was all around when a worker at China’s leading IT firm Pinduoduo recently collapsed and died under the pressure of overwork. But despite the fierce reactions, IT analyst Matthew Brennan, author of Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance, does not expect the culture of overwork in China’s IT firms will disappear, he tells Vice.Read More →

Content creation has been key for short-form engagement, writes the Jing Daily. And for  Bytedance’s Douyin/Tiktok it has paved the way from its original base of millennials to mainstream engagement, adds Matthew Brennan, author of  “Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance.Read More →

Bytedance’s Tiktok is a very successful global video-platform, and one of the few with a background in China. China internet watcher Matthew Brennan, author of “Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance, explains what makes Tiktok so successful. Getting feedback from its users is one of the key differences with other platforms, he tells in Explica.Read More →

Douyin – the Chinese name of Tiktok – became a runaway success as a short-video platform in China. Tech watcher Matthew Brennan looks in his book ‘Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok and China’s ByteDance’ at the playbook Bytedance used for their lift-off before they took the platform global. An excerpt from Techcrunch.Read More →

Most Chinese tech companies tried to figure out what US consumers wanted before they entered the market, but Bytedance did not care when it launched Tiktok in 2018, says internet veteran Matthew Brennan in his book “Attention Factory: The Story of Tiktok and China’s Bytedance.” The lack of strategy almost backfired, but after some hiccups, the company became a runaway success, Brennan writes in an excerpt in Technode.Read More →

For a while, London was in the running to get the Tiktok international headquarters, but under the Tiktok-Oracle deal the UK’s capital seems to have lost that opportunity, says China internet watcher Matthew Brennan to CNBC. That seems another setback for the UK now the country is already suffering under the corona crisis and Brexit.Read More →

Tencent might still dominate social media in China with WeChat and QQ, but competition is heating up, and the internet giant is preparing for more competition, says Tencent watcher Matthew Brennan in Asia One. Asia One: “WeChat and QQ are like huge ships … too big to change course toRead More →