TikTok vs. Facebook: TikTok's parent company ByteDance is growing fast — even faster than Facebook ever did

6/17/21 8:00PM

We don't usually get much of a look inside ByteDance — the private parent company of red-hot social media app TikTok. However, this week ByteDance revealed that its revenue last year had leapt up to more than $34bn.

‍ByteDance owns TikTok, which is known as Douyin in China, as well as Toutiao (which is a Chinese news platform), and has had a phenomenal rise to become the most valuable start-up in the world.

‍Social giant speed run

‍Although its $34bn of revenue is some way off the $86bn that social media giant Facebook pulled in last year, it's a truly insane number when you consider that ByteDance was only founded in 2012. That makes 2020 its eighth ever full year of results. At that age Facebook, which was famously founded in Zuckerberg's Harvard dormitory in 2004, was pulling in just over $5bn. Even accounting for some inflation, ByteDance is growing at an unbelievable rate.

Apart from just having some of the most addictive content and sharing mechanics of any social media app, TikTok has — somewhat ironically — been able to advertise itself on other giant platforms. That has meant spending literally millions — and probably billions — on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other social apps in the hope that people install TikTok and then forget to go on those other apps.

Facebook would probably love to have not allowed TikTok to advertise, but with Congress looking for any whiff of anti-competitive behaviour to reprimand big tech over, that probably wouldn't be a good look.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5