ByteDance executive disputes 'Byte Time' claim, citing competitive landscape

ChainCatcher report: On the evening of October 27, Li Liang, Vice President of ByteDance, responded on Weibo to journalist and financial observer Qin Shu’s notion of “ByteDance Time” in Chinese internet, calling the characterization “highly imprecise and pure nonsense.” Liang stated that no company can be labeled as “the XX time of Chinese internet”; instant messaging benefits from a relatively stable network effect moat, while short films and short videos are highly competitive with rapidly shifting market dynamics. He added that Tencent’s short film and short video growth rates far exceed those of Douyin and Hongguo, and that instant messaging, gaming, e-commerce, and music also consume significant user time. He later posted that Qin Shu’s analysis contained several fundamental factual errors. On October 26, Qin Shu published an article on his WeChat public account “Qin Shu’s Circle,” citing data from Nomura Securities’ QuestMobile report stating that in July 2026, Douyin surpassed WeChat for the first time among the top 50 mobile internet apps by usage time, accounting for 19.4% compared to WeChat’s 18.8%; ByteDance’s total app usage share reached 40.9%, while Tencent’s was 29.1%. He questioned whether the Chinese internet was shifting from “Tencent Time” to “ByteDance Time,” and from “WeChat Time” to “Douyin + Hongguo Time.” Earlier that day, Qin Shu posted on his Moments that in the August 2026 rankings, ByteDance’s share reached 41.8% versus Tencent’s 28.6%, a gap of 13.2 percentage points. He argued that “ByteDance Time” accurately summarizes ByteDance’s total usage share exceeding 40%—a “very realistic fact”—while emphasizing that user time share does not equate to user value share. On the same day, Hongguo Short Videos, ByteDance’s short-form video platform, issued a statement denying claims circulating online that its annualized revenue was approaching RMB 40 billion or that its 2026 revenue reached RMB 42–45 billion. The statement asserted these figures were unfounded, with no factual basis for comparisons, calculations, or derived interpretations, and emphasized that most revenue is currently reinvested into content creator payouts, copyright guarantees, and support for high-quality content. Third-party data shows that as of July 2026, Hongguo Short Videos had 168 million daily active users, a year-over-year increase of 107%. On October 19, Liu Xing, Head of Public Relations at DouBao, responded to claims that “over half of China’s computing power is used to produce feel-good dramas,” calling the data unreliable. For ByteDance specifically, only about 10% of its total computing power is allocated to training and inference for video generation models.