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August 2016, Menlo Part, California, Facebook headquarters. Instagram co-founders Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger are anxiously staring at a computer screen. They're about to do the tech equivalent of a heist, and this theft is happening in broad daylight.
Krieger looks at Sistram. Okay, Instagram stories is live. Sistram immediately goes from relief to foreboding. They've just ripped off Snapchat's key feature, vanishing posts. With Instagram stories, users can post photos or videos that disappear after 24 hours.
It would be an ingenious edition. If they hadn't stolen it from Snapchat, the plagiarism is so blatant they don't even bother to change the feature's name, stories. But Instagram's under pressure. Snapchat is one over Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2015.
And while Gen Z users want to freely share their antics and opinions, they don't want to leave a permanent digital trail for disapproving parents or future employers. They want those posts to disappear. It's the capability that launch Snapchat after all.
Instagram's still ahead with more than 300 million daily users compared to Snapchat's 150 million. But the top brass is badgering Sistram and Krieger to do whatever it takes to keep Snapchat in check. Depending on how you look at it, this steel was either bold or reckless.
Sistram takes a deep breath before he picks up. It's Zuckerberg. Hi Kevin. Do we know how stories is doing yet? We've only just launched so no numbers yet. But we'll let you know as soon as we do. He puts the phone down and rolls his eyes at Krieger. The feature has been live for exactly one minute and Zuckerberg's already turning up the heat. The stakes are that high.
For Zuckerberg, the success of this new app feature is personal. Three years ago, he tried to buy Snapchat for $3 billion but its founder Evan Speagle turned him down. Now, Zuckerberg's determined to make Speagle regret that decision.
Zuckerberg's strategy beg, borrow or steal to win. The phrase, don't be too proud to copy, has become a motto at Facebook. The press quickly calls foul. Uh oh. Mike, check out these headlines. Krieger starts reading over System Shoulder.
Instagram is a copycat and the internet is not pleased. Instagram stories are a near perfect copy of Snapchat stories. System shakes his head. I don't know what else we're supposed to do. Mark basically told us to copy Snapchat. Yeah, and uh, we need to stay competitive. Listen, if it works, it'll be worth it. Let's just see what happens.
They've weathered pushback before. In June, people protested a new algorithm that rearranged the order of posts based on what the companies AI determined they would like. At first, people complained, but then they got used to it. With Instagram stories, the same thing happens. While the media fusses about Zuckerberg ripping off Snapchat, Instagram's users don't seem to care.
Most two months after the launch, more than 100 million people are actively posting to Instagram stories every day. Stealing another startup's ideas has worked brilliantly for Instagram. And that will spell trouble for TikTok.
Hi, I'm Sarah Haggie, co-host of Wondering's podcast Scample Insers. In our recent two-part series, Three Weddings and a Funeral, we dive into the story of a German con man who built an entire life on fake names, lies, and schemes. And the unlikely true-kind twist that brought this decades-long charade crashing down. Listen to Scample Insers on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts.
From Wondering, I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars. In the last episode, we heard how Instagram's Mike Krieger and Kevin System started working together and how bite dances Jean Eaming got his start in China working at startups before striking out on his own. Now we pick up in 2016 with the explosive growth of Instagram and a new player on the scene, Musically.
August 2016, Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California. Zuckerberg is sitting in a glass wall meeting room known as the Aquarium. He rubs his eyes. He just got back from another trip to China. Facebook is blocked from operating on the mainland, so Zuckerberg's courting Chinese officials, trying to make inroads in a market with 1.4 billion people. He's even learning Mandarin.
Meanwhile, Chinese entrepreneurs are taking ground in the US. The popular Shanghai-based app Musically allows users to upload 15-second clips of themselves lip-syncing and dancing to songs. It already has 90 million users worldwide and it's spreading like wildfire with the lucrative tween and teen audience. Some reports say more than 50% of American teens already have the app and Zuckerberg wants in.
He's arranged to sit down with Alex Zhu, the app's Chinese founder. Zhu is in his late 30s with long black hair just beginning to show some grace trans. He's dressed in a simple sweater and jeans.
Alex is so nice to finally meet you. Mark, it's a pleasure.. Zuckerberg gets down to business. We're very impressed with how musically as grown, particularly with young people. Thanks. As I'm sure you know, most of our audiences between 13 and 20.
Zhu knows that Zuckerberg is a kingmaker in Silicon Valley. He forked out a billion dollars for Instagram and Zhu can smell the payoff. He's pitching him, but Zuckerberg doesn't need persuading. He sees how young people are ditching Facebook for hip-hop platforms like Snapchat. He knows video is at the center of the appeal. An app like musically would be a lifeline.
Well, we'd like to begin talking about what a potential acquisition would look like. That's a very exciting prospect. Why don't you come to our headquarters in Shanghai? That way you can see how we work. Zuckerberg makes the trip the following month, but a deal never materializes. While a tween and teen audience is attractive, Zuckerberg worries about coming under fire for collecting data without parental consent.
Back in China, bite dance founder Zhang Yiming is watching Zhu's rise with interest. He sees Zhu as a rival, cut from the same cloth, a Chinese entrepreneur who is making it big in America. Right now, they're competitors. Zhu is someone Zhang would very much like to have on bite dances team. Zhang has steadily been growing his company. It's now home to a suite of apps, including TOTYO, a news aggregator app with millions of users. Zhang wants to rule mobile, and he's willing to team up with Zhu to do it.
September 2016 Beijing, China. A young man dances in front of his iPhone, which is playing a popular Chinese pop song. After 15 seconds, he picks his phone up and watches the looping image of himself. He adds to smiley face emojis to the video, and selects a filter that gives the entire frame a rosy hue. Satisfied? He clicks, publish. This is his first post on Do-Yin.
Do-Yin translates to shaking sound or vibrato and its Zhang's latest invention. As Do-Yin, Zhang is delivering content based on the same powerful AI algorithm he uses in TOTYO. But instead of news, the app lets people make and share short bite-sized videos set to music. Silly videos of users singing, dancing, and messing around.
Short-form videos are huge in China. All the major tech companies, including Baido and Tencent, have short-form video apps. But Zhang believes people want the equivalent of video candy. No politics are bad news. He wants to offer them something fun and easy, like cute songs and dances.
And Zhang has been paying attention to the lip-syncing app musically. It launched two years earlier, and his sense taken off. But his new app Do-Yin is extremely similar with full-screen videos. But the content expands beyond lip-syncing to include dancing and free-form silliness. To one-up competitors, he makes the videos high-definition.
But Zhang isn't going to wait for Do-Yin to go viral on its own. March 2017, Beijing, China. An LED sign spells out bite dance in English and Mandarin characters on the face of a beige brick building surrounded by skyscrapers. It's after 8pm on a Saturday. Inside, rows of engineers are still working quietly at their desks. A man gets up from his keyboard to grab the complimentary barbecue dinner. He passes a colleague in the hall and greets him by name. That's unusual in China, where employees normally address each other by their job title instead.
Bite dance has adopted some of the trappings of American startup culture, but it mostly adheres to Chinese norms. Like the 996 Work Week, employees known as bite dancers work from 9am to 9pm six days a week. And they're still on call even after those grueling hours. Zhang is no exception. Tonight he sits in his office going over some paperwork. He's crossing the teas and dotting the eyes on the final acquisition papers for Flipagram, an American short movie making app. He's been on a bit of a shopping spree to grow his suite of products thanks to a recent round of funding that raised a billion dollars. In just five years, the company has developed eight different apps. Right now Zhang's focused on growing Do-Yin.
Zhang gets a ping on bite dance's internal messaging service. It's from one of his lieutenants. Aiming, we have an idea for a dance challenge on Do-Yin.
What sort of thing? Remember Gangnam Style? How could he not? Without a ragiously popular Korean dance and song that was the first to grab one billion YouTube hits, proving dance videos can go viral and drive growth. Last year Hip Hop duo Ray Sremmerds' mannequin challenge had people freezing in positions like mannequins, and a dance move from the video game Fortnite called Flossing is beginning to pick up speed two. The cogs are turning.
Yes, a Do-Yin user has come up with a dance.. Very good. Send me the video when it's complete. The next day, Zhang gets a link to a new Do-Yin post. He sees a slim Chinese woman wearing a great t-shirt and shorts sitting on her bed. The camera is in selfie mode. As an upbeat soundtrack plays, she mows the words and punches her fists at the camera and time to the beat, then cups her hands into a heart shape.
“唉,一个 Do-Yin 用户想出了一支舞蹈...太棒了!完成后请把视频发给我。”之后的一天,张收到了一个新的 Do-Yin 帖子链接。他看到一位身材苗条的中国女士穿着一件很棒的 T 恤和短裤坐在床上。相机处于自拍模式。伴随着欢快的背景音乐,她朗诵字句,对着镜头挥舞着拳头,并按拍子的节奏做出动作,随后合拢双手成为心形。
Zhang is pleased. The dance is simple, short and easy to recreate. He thinks people will copy it. But he wants to be certain. So he rejiggers the Do-Yin algorithm. The video shows up in millions of news feeds, and sure enough, soon users are recreating it. People start downloading Do-Yin so they can make their own version.
As the dance spreads, Do-Yin catches fire in China. Within a year, it has 100 million users, nearly half the size of Snapchat, but it's only available in China. Zhang wants to take Do-Yin international, but he's got a problem. The name Do-Yin. English speakers struggle to pronounce the Chinese syllables, and its translation, shaking sound, is hardly catchy.
Then there's China's very strict censorship laws. President moderators sweep the app constantly to make sure there's nothing that will offend the Chinese government. He knows he needs to make an international version free from any Chinese oversight, so he settles on the same concept, but with a different name. This time, he calls it TikTok. But he's got major competition. TikTok is a knockoff of musically, which has exploded in the US.
Zhang knows musically doesn't have the algorithm he does. What musically does have are young influencers, known as musers, using its platform. Teenagers like Baby Ariel and Jacob Sartorius, who have millions of followers. These influencers keep teens coming back to musically. So Zhang decides to copy musically's tactic.
September 2017. A young man with shaggy brown hair and a hoodie stares at the camera in selfie mode, and leans over to show a monkey on his back. This is David Dobrik. The 21-year-old is not your typical Hollywood celebrity. He's unpolished and not movie star attractive. He's part of a new breed of social media influencers who've gotten famous from their antics on platforms like Instagram and YouTube and musically. Only now, Dobrik's getting paid handsomely by TikTok.
He posts videos at a breakneck pace, jumping into a giant bean bag, firing a flame throw where his friends. Chasing his friend with a purple smoke bomb. They're all part of Zhang's larger strategy. With bite dance now valued at around $20 billion, Zhang has money to blow. So to create buzz around TikTok's US launch, he's poached musers like Dobrik to push the app to their followers. Dobrik posts links to his TikTok videos on Instagram and Twitter. Users who click the links are then prompted to download TikTok.
Zhang has musically squarely in his sights. He wants to grow TikTok at all costs, and he's willing to shell out to do it. So he takes a page from Zuckerberg's book. November 2017 Beijing, China. Zhang sits down with Alex Zhu, musically founder.
张先生把音乐应用 Musically 放在了他的关注点上,他想不惜一切代价扩大 TikTok 并愿意倾斜资源。他采用了类似扎克伯格的方法。在2017年11月的北京,张先生与 Musically 创始人 Alex Zhu 开了个会面。
Alex, thank you for meeting me. Mr. Zhang, it's a pleasure. And please call me E-Ming. Zhang is far more informal than the average Chinese entrepreneur. He wears jeans to the office and likes to be called by his first name. He sees Zhu as a kindred spirit with his long hair and hippie flair. But while he respects his rival, Zhang's hungry for a deal that will neutralize musically. He doesn't want to waste time growing TikTok's users organically. Instead, Zhang's hoping to buy musically to acquire theirs.
Look, I know you've had a lot of interest from other companies, but we're the most serious. We would like to offer $800 million for musically. And you'd keep your job running it.
Zhu pauses. It's a life-changing number. He'd be teaming up with the biggest news aggregator in China and one of the largest startups in the world.
朱停了下来,这是个改变人生的数字。他将和中国最大的新闻聚合器以及世界上最大的初创公司合作。
Would you keep musically as a separate app or roll it into TikTok?
你会把Musically保留作为一个独立的应用程序还是把它和TikTok合并吗?
And you keep it separate for now. One day, when the time is right, we combine them. Zhu nods. It makes sense. He admires Zhang, a fellow Chinese entrepreneur who has built something truly original.
Zhu puts out his hand. We've got a deal. Musically now belongs to Bytan's, giving Zhang his first foray into the US. And it's a strong one. 60 million young American users. Bytan's is ready to take on the world.. Zhang knows he'll have to face off with Instagram and its powerful CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Bytan's may be getting ready to rattle Instagram's gates.
But first, the photo app will have to face down trouble on the home front. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries Podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, and corporate fraud. In our newest series, we look at a covert US operation that toppled a democratic government in Iran.
In 1951, Muhammad Mosadek was elected Iran's prime minister. Mosadek was largely focused on strengthening his country's democratic institutions. But he also saw to nationalize Iran's oil industry, letting his country's citizens profit from their own natural resources. But as Mosadek carried out his sweeping reforms, US officials grew concerned that Iran would soon fall under the sway of communists. And with the blessing of America's top political leaders, the CIA launched a mission to oust Mosadek from power.
The campaign involved bribes, psychological warfare, and staged riots. And it all led to a showdown that promised to reshape the Middle East for decades. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts, and you can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondries App.
July 2018, Menlo Park, California. System and Krieger are sitting in their trendy new Instagram offices full of brightly-cuttered walls and perfectly lit rooms put together by a Hollywood set designer. Their app just reached a whopping 1 billion users. But the pair has been budding heads with Zuckerberg over little things, like tweaks to the app and staffing changes. Instagram once operated separately from Facebook, but Zuckerberg has been slowly encroaching on their independence.
System looks at his phone. It's a news article about Facebook's latest earnings call with investors. System scans the story and starts to fume. Mike, have you seen this article? No, what are you talking about? System starts reading aloud. Here's a quote from Mark. This is rich. We believe Instagram has been able to use Facebook's infrastructure to grow more than twice as quickly as it would have on its own. What the hell? System is furious. How dare he take credit for our 1 billion users? Yeah, we built that, not him.
Commit Facebook's dropping user revenue and growth. Zuckerberg's highlighting the one bright spot. Instagram. The app has become a lifeline for Facebook producing revenue that makes its 1 billion dollar price tag look paltry. Some experts say Instagram is now worth $100 billion.
System and Krieger know that Zuckerberg underpaid. And to add insult to injury, Zuckerberg is publicly taking credit for their achievements. Zuckerberg asks one of his lieutenants to make a list of all the ways Facebook helped Instagram's growth rather than the other way around. It seems like every day, systems on a new magazine cover are giving an interview taking all the credit. Zuckerberg's growing resentful.
Just then, System's phone buzzes. Hi, Kevin. I'm making some changes to the way Facebook funnels users to Instagram. Instagram is immediately suspicious. What kind of changes? Removing certain features like allowing Instagram to import your Facebook friends and suggesting them as followers. And I'm taking away a shortcut to Instagram from within Facebook's app. That's sort of thing.
System is usually mild mannered, but now he's furious. He feels like he's being punished. Why would you do that? I need to protect the well-being of the Facebook app. So I need to concentrate growth there rather than funneling everyone to Instagram. You understand. But System doesn't understand. He sends a memo to Instagram employees informing them of the changes and making it very clear he disagrees with Zuckerberg's actions. The move raises eyebrows among Instagram's employees. There's surprised System isn't maintaining a united front.
While Instagram is in turmoil, one of its biggest competitors also happens to be one of its biggest customers. In 2018, TikTok spends more than $1 billion to advertise on Facebook and Instagram. Its meeting its prospective users where they are on social networking sites. Even if the strategy means lining the pockets of TikTok's rivals in the short term, Zhang is confident it'll pay off.
In August 2018, bite dance takes another step to stake out TikTok's supremacy. Less than a year after purchasing musically, bite dance folds the app into TikTok. All of musically's user profiles are transferred over, and Zhu becomes its CEO. TikTok is officially a behemoth.
Zuckerberg meanwhile had promised Krieger and System they'd rule Instagram independently. And now he's gone back on that promise. And he's about to see the repercussions of his actions.. In a big way.
September 24th, 2018, Menlo Park, California. It's one of System's first days back in the office after paternity leave. He and Krieger huddle over a laptop poised when out's a very important decision.
Over the past three months, Zuckerberg's made unilateral decisions without consulting them. He's pushed through design changes the pair never would have allowed. He's even tested location tracking. Is the last straw.
Yeah. You're right. System half suspect Zuckerberg has been trying to make his life hell so he'll resign. All right. I think it's getting poised. Let's do it.
On the next episode, Facebook mounts an attack with a copycat product. TikTok cements its place in pop culture but faces a serious threat from regulators.
Say prime members, you can binge every episode of business wars, add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today. Or you can listen, add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.
From Wondery, this is episode three of TikTok versus Instagram for business wars.
从Wondery开始,这是《TikTok对Instagram的商业战争》的第三集。
A quick note about recreations you've been hearing in most cases we can't know exactly what was said, those scenes are dramatizations but they're based on historical research. If you'd like to learn more about Instagram, we recommend No Filter, the Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Freyer.
关于你们听到的重现场景的一个快速说明:在大多数情况下我们不能很准确地知道当时说了什么,这些场景是戏剧化的再现,但它们是基于历史研究的。如果你想了解更多关于 Instagram 的内容,我们推荐读 Sarah Freyer 的《没有过滤器的Instagram内幕故事》。
I'm your host David Brown, Natalie Roba Med wrote this story, Karen Low is our senior producer and editor, edited and produced by Emily Frost, sound designed by Kyle Randall. Kate Young is our associate producer, our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman and Marshall Luey, created by Ernan Lopez.
我是您的主持人 David Brown,这篇报道由 Natalie Roba Med 撰写,Karen Low 是我们的高级制作人和编辑,制作人是 Emily Frost,音效设计是 Kyle Randall。Kate Young 是我们的副制作人,执行制作人是 Jenny Lauer Beckman 和 Marshall Luey,由 Ernan Lopez 创造。