113: Chapter 113 How to Stand Out?

In the beginning, Zhang Yiming's thoughts and approach were very simple and straightforward.

Regarding these comments,

he simply blocked and banned them.

However, this instead provoked a rebellious reaction from netizens.

Seeing their content being "swallowed" by the officials,

these netizens decided to go all the way.

Through various means, they continued to subtly accuse Douyin of plagiarizing the foreign software, Musical.ly.

For example, using acrostic poems,

or arranging text in reverse,

or simply uploading images with text inside videos instead of actual text.

At this time, Douyin's OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology was not yet mature.

If a user only uploaded an image containing text,

it was difficult for Douyin to audit the images themselves.

Of course, manual review could indeed mitigate some of these risks,

and once such images were discovered during manual review, they were quickly blocked and banned.

But one cannot wrap fire in paper forever.

Since there was no way to post such comments on Douyin itself,

many netizens simply shifted their battlefield

and went to Weibo.

With more and more Big Vs publicly expressing their views,

the matter continued to ferment,

the situation grew more intense,

and even topped Weibo's trending list at one point.

#Douyin Plagiarizes Musical.ly

Many people compared the two

and found that their core functions were indeed very similar.

Pixel-level imitation of the interface,

the operation of swiping up to enter the next video,

and the mainstream video content of short videos paired with music clips—

it was simply very obvious and low-level plagiarism.

Many people looked down on such plagiarism,

spontaneously wanting to boycott the act,

refusing to download Douyin,

while inciting those around them to delete the Douyin software from their phones.

ByteDance naturally noticed this situation as well

and quickly contacted Weibo,

asking them to remove the trending topic.

But Weibo was at the height of its power in this era,

and also had ideas about entering the short video field.

Seeing Douyin in trouble,

they were more than happy about it,

so how could they possibly cooperate with Douyin?

Therefore, Weibo simply chose to ignore them.

Fortunately, the funding Huayao provided to ByteDance was still very ample.

Zhang Yiming allocated a large portion of these funds for public relations

to handle the various public opinion storms that had occurred recently.

But the power of such a small team was ultimately limited.

After hiring internet water armies to whitewash for a long time,

there was still no significant reversal in public opinion.

Some water army accounts were even directly banned by Weibo.

Zhang Yiming's mentality completely collapsed.

He finally felt he couldn't go on,

and in desperation, he could only request a meeting with Young Boss Bai.

At this time, Bai Jingqing was considering issues regarding smart wearable devices,

still thinking about which one to pull from the system to go public with next.

Hearing that Zhang Yiming wanted to see him,

he agreed immediately.

Regarding the Douyin software,

he still placed great importance on it.

The current market was basically a "rat race" of hardware.

Once hardware reached saturation in the future,

entering an era of surplus performance,

and everyone had competed to their limit,

where basically every manufacturer could provide a similar hardware experience,

at that point, the competition would shift to the ecosystem, software, and services.

And once Douyin reached a certain scale,

it would basically become a highly profitable business in the future,

bringing him massive returns.

Naturally, he was very protective of this sapling.

After Zhang Yiming met Bai Jingqing,

looking at Bai Jingqing's youthful face,

he felt somewhat speechless for a moment.

Was the gap between people really this large?

He looked about the same age as himself,

yet he hadn't expected that when he encountered such a problem,

he would actually have to seek help from a peer.

He suddenly felt his own incompetence.

After hearing Zhang Yiming explain the current predicament Douyin was facing,

Bai Jingqing only asked him one question: "If Douyin wants to gain a firm foothold in the future market,

what do you think is the most core element?"

This question directly stumped Zhang Yiming.

"The most core element? Future market?"

He had indeed never thought about this question before.

At this moment, he realized the gap between himself and the peer in front of him.

His vision was indeed narrow,

only seeing the immediate situation.

"From the current perspective,

Douyin's way of disseminating content is very novel,

attracting a large number of users.

But looking toward the future,

how should Douyin attract more users from different groups

and keep them all on Douyin?"

Bai Jingqing slowly continued to ask.

Zhang Yiming frowned in deep thought,

but he didn't have an answer that satisfied himself.

He could only shake his head.

Bai Jingqing said with a smile, "Perhaps Douyin did indeed plagiarize Musical.ly,

and in the future, even more manufacturers will plagiarize it.

In other words,

in just a few years,

various softwares similar to Douyin,

or rather, similar to the Musical.ly you mentioned, will appear on the market.

They will also be able to play the next video by swiping down,

have similar video content,

and have rich basic functions—

after all, these basic functions are indeed not difficult to make.

And more crucially,

this kind of thing has no patent protection;

at most, it just gives people an excuse to accuse them of plagiarism.

But how will Douyin stand out among so many manufacturers

and become the most unique one?

Douyin can be said to be the first manufacturer in the domestic market to 'eat the crab' of short videos,

but how can you ensure that Douyin can be the one to devour this crab alone,

or at least be the manufacturer that gets the vast majority of the meat?"

Indeed!

Currently, there are only a few such short video platforms on the domestic market.

Douyin has only captured the largest market share with the support of Huayao.

However, many small video platforms are already making similar attempts,

imitating Douyin's interface and format.

Zhang Yiming finally realized at this moment.

Regarding the recent narrative of Douyin plagiarizing Musical.ly,

Zhang Yiming reckoned it must be those big companies testing the bottom line of the people nationwide,

wanting to see if such blatant plagiarism would provoke public outrage,

or perhaps giving the general public a 'vaccination' of sorts,

because in the future, these big companies will also enter the short video platform arena for a showdown.

No matter how much they innovate,

they certainly won't be able to bypass such a basic model,

which is basically similar to the current Douyin.

At that time, if someone accuses them of plagiarizing Douyin,

they can step forward and say that Douyin also plagiarized Musical.ly.

In this way, Douyin falls into a quagmire of self-justification.

Everyone is a turtle in the same mud pit,

all equally dirty,

so what's the point of talking about plagiarism?

And the key to this public opinion storm was not plagiarism at all,

but rather how Douyin would stand out among so many competitors.