Independently Published Attention Factory: The Story Of Tiktok And China'S Bytedance

This is an interesting book but print quality is bad it triggers my OCD.As delivery currently takes at least 2 weeks i believe they rushed to print and ship copies during the holidays.

A really engaging read, which not only tells the story of Tiktok from the very beginning, but also shines a light on the often stark differences between Chinese and Western (primarily US) tech companies and their practices.

I am determined to influence my own children not to use TikTok much.

The Attention Factory - The story of TikTok- Book ReviewThe author does great research into Yiming's childhood and college days and explores Yiming's clearheaded decision making prowess.Tiktok' success cannot be attributed to just sheer luck as he analyzes the clever decision making behind every major feature.Every startup that Yiming worked for, he picked up essential building blocks for his grand castle-Tiktok.It could be his real estate startup where he learnt to release 5-6 apps and then based on response, back all his resources on just 1 app.At his 'Headlines' app, he understood the pivotal need to understand user profiling and started developing TikTok's greatest strength - Accurate Recommendation Engine, using which he could double or triple the time users spent on his app, because of the content exactly tailored to their tastes was seamlessly and endlessly served.He started developing this recommendation engine, when even YouTube hadn't started working on it.Another angle that the Author brilliantly covers is the insane app competition in China. Billions of dollars are pumped in by industry leaders like Wechat to replicate TikTok's app and even more dollars to market these apps. But the ecosystem that Yiming built and the incentives he built to attract content creator prevents his competition from cracking his kingdom.Then Yiming's ambition takes him to conquer the most conservative overseas market - JAPAN. The initial tweaks his team make to attract content creators is very creative and successful.When Yiming enters US, they are surprised by the poor level of competition and their technical prowess. Tiktok's recommendation engine is far superior and once they acquire Musical.ly in US which was a niche app for preteens, they tweak it to cater to content creators from all sectors of life.After few hiccups, their growth and addiction is unstoppable. The story ends in 2020, where the US govt is threatening Tiktok to split and be acquired by a US owner.Overall, great read over three days. Interesting exposure to how the Chinese ecosystem works and the sheer competition they have to crack to become a success, that the world market seems easy for them.- Raghavender Velpula

Brennan's book starts at the early beginnings of the company. Based on research in Chinese documents and conversations with employees of Bytedance, he describes the history of founder Zhang Yiming and his company in a pleasant way. The book is a pleasant and accessible read. It is not a dry summary of facts and the narrative style is sometimes reminiscent of Evan Osnos' writings in The New Yorker. Most chapters start with an atmosphere setting like “A faint hum emanated from the room ahead” or “It was bitterly cold that day”. While I sometimes had my reservations about how Brennan could have known that certain events and conversations had taken place as he describes them, that's a relatively insignificant caveat to an approach that makes the book a lot more compelling to read. Chapters also begin with short timelines that list the major chronological events in each chapter. Quite handy if you want to look something up later.Attention Factory is divided into two parts. The Back End covers the personal background of Bytedance founder Zhang Yiming, the early years of the company and Jinri Toutiao in four chapters. This section also discusses the technical workings of “recommendation engines” in detail. That may seem like a boring topic, but the way it is explained is accessible and it is essential to understand Bytedance's apps. The strength of their apps lies in presenting the right content to the user, based on his own viewing and sharing behavior (to other platforms) as well as that of others. This is precisely why apps like TikTok are so addictive; they show you exactly what you like or find interesting. This background material is essential to understanding Bytedance's success. You can still hear people describe TikTok as a social network, but much more than that it is actually a content and entertainment app. The 'social graph' that is so important in social networks such as Facebook hardly plays a role in Bytedance's apps.The second part of the book, The Front End, deals almost entirely with the short video apps Musical.ly, Douyin and TikTok in another four chapters. Brennan gives a brief introduction to the rise of short video and the success of Musical.ly. An eye-opener was how the latter app, which was eventually bought by Bytedance and integrated in Douyin / TikTok, was very much 'inspired' by a less well-known video app developed in Paris called Mindie. Brennan's description of how retailers install additional apps on smartphones before selling them also made my jaw drop.In the two parts, Brennan clearly explains, based on facts and interpretations, how Bytedance and its apps could become such a huge success. But how do you wrap-up writing a book about a company and an app that are constantly in the news in 2020? The app was banned in India and Trump threatened a ban if TikTok would not be split from Bytedance in the US. This case has been dragging on for several. It was a dilemma that Brennan faced.Given that the TikTok affair in the United States did not seem to be coming to an end any time soon, he took the wise decision not to wait for the conclusion. The battle between Trump and TikTok is therefore only mentioned briefly in the short prologue and epilogue and Brennan’s book ends after the enormous growth that TikTok experienced worldwide during the social distancing period of the start of the corona crisis.In the prologue Brennan states that he did not want to contribute to the growing stream of articles and discussions that have arisen thanks to the 'tech cold war'. He mainly wanted to focus on the questions 'Why TikTok? Why Bytedance? Why short video?'. An understandable choice, although I personally regret that Brennan has not devoted a final chapter to the international battles that Bytedance has found itself in and could have an impact on the future of the company.The book also makes little to no mention of the criticism that Bytedance has received about the ways in which it monitors and censors content in the app, or when it fails to do so for that matter. The app has frequently come under fire for men with dubious intentions using TikTok to contact young children imitating their favourite, scantily clad pop stars. There are also stories of intentional or unintentional censorship of content related to human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. These too are important aspects of the 'story of TikTok' that the title of the book promises. Brennan realizes this all too well and mentions several other topics in the epilogue that he would have liked to cover, but which did not make it into the final book. Besides, Bytedance has a reputation for cracking down on critics with an army of lawyers. Maybe Brennan didn’t want to take that risk.If you have to make a choice between the printed version or the e-book from Attention Factory, then I recommend that you go for the e-book (if you like reading e-books that is). Not only are the images in the e-book in “full color”, while the printed version comes entirely in shades of gray, it also gives you the opportunity to zoom in on the often very interesting images and diagrams created by Valentina Segovia. Many of these images are laid out in landscape, as if they were intended for a PowerPoint presentation. Unfortunately, this means that in a book with portrait layout they had to be scaled down considerably, which sometimes makes them hard to read. The style of Segovia’s handwriting in her illustrations subsequently does not help.The book is 283 pages thick, but 40 of them are taken up with endnotes and references to the sources Brennan used in his research. Partly due to font size and line spacing, this is a bit of a waste of paper in the printed version. It is a pity that in the e-book the references to internet pages do not contain hyperlinks, which would have made it much easier to click-through to those sources.Despite these minor shortcomings, Brennan does a great job at his primary objective of addressing the lack of knowledge regarding Bytedance. In addition, he shows the enormous speed with which these kinds of events take place in China's dynamic internet sector. It has been a joy to read the book.