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'After a Stint As TikTok Chief, Alex Zhu Returns To His ‘primary Passion’'. 0'ByteDance Appoints Former TikTok Boss And Musical.ly Founder Alex Zhu As Strategic Investment Head'. 'TikTok's Former CEO Alex Zhu Takes On Investment Duties At ByteDance'. Zhu was said to have been married, there weren't many information about his personal life as Zhu wanted to keep it private all the time. The app was later acquired by ByteDance for 1$ billion to be merged as a separate app from Douyin, renaming the app as ' TikTok'. TIME ranked Musical.ly at 7th in their 25 Best Apps of the Year, as well as receiving the Wall Street Journal’s 2017 Innovators Award. On July 6, 2015, Musical.ly became the number one app in the iTunes app store and was called the first Chinese social media app that was popular in the United States. In April 2015, the team noticed that the videos from Musical.ly were posted on both Twitter and Instagram while making a few minor design changes to the app, which led them to reposition the watermark to make it clear that it belongs to Musical.ly. This was where Zhu shifted the focus of the app from education, to entertainment. The app was instantly a success, over 500 users were downloading the app daily. Zhu's team created an app based on his concept in 30 days, naming it ' Musical.ly'. This is where Zhu got his new idea for an app. With 8% of their money remaining, Alex Zhu, while embarking on a train in Mountain View, California, noticed a group of young teenagers taking selfies, listening to music, and adding stickers with their phones. When the app was first released, it ' was doomed to be a failure' because videos took too long and ' it didn't hit the target demographic of teens'. Alex Zhu and his co-founder raised $250,000 in venture from China Rock Capital Management to develop an app called Cicada for six months.

Carrer Cicada to Musical.ly Development Main Article: Musical.lyĪlex Zhu and his long-time friend Luyu Yang met while working as Directors of Product at an insurtech company in Shanghai, eBaoTech. Zhu briefly worked as a Creative Director at Microsoft, driving ' mobile disruption' initiatives in the consumer space. He also took a special interest in education while there and came up with the idea of becoming an entrepreneur himself by developing an app for hosting short-form educational videos. He went to the United States to work as a product designer and manager for the German company SAP, for which he earned the title of ' futurist of education' in 2000. Zhu worked in China until he realized that things ' were not as smooth as he thought.' His journey from an engineer to an entrepreneur was almost impossible for him due to failure. After graduating, Zhu worked as a designer for China Pages before he was hired to run a product design team at WebEx until 2004. Zhu attended an elite institution, Zhejiang University, to study civil engineering and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2000. “They could do with a dedicated home for longer-form content as doesn’t sit so well in the vertical feed with shorter stuff people are used to whizzing through at speed,” he says.Alex Zhu was born in 1979 and raised in Anhui, an eastern landlocked Chinese province.

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Speaking to The Verge, Navarra says longer-form content is, in general, “easier to monetize and keeps people on platform longer.” But he says TikTok will now need to work out exactly how to position and present these videos on its platform.

All these companies are trying to get the formula right. Instagram launched short-form videos in the form of Reels, YouTube has the aptly-named Shorts, and Snapchat offers what it calls Spotlight. Ironically, as TikTok expands to offer creators and users longer content, its rivals - spurred by TikTok’s success - have done the opposite. In other words: getting the length of content right is something of a balancing act. At the same time, a switch to longer content may hurt the firm by limiting the amount of data it can collect on users’ watching habits, which is what allows it to customize the algorithms it uses to attract users in the first place. Longer videos allow TikTok to better compete with YouTube (which skews heavily toward lengthy content) as well as capture an older audience and increase overall engagement time on the app. I can now upload videos up to 10 minutes long /P2Mbf4ygWV- Matt Navarra February 28, 2022Īlthough TikTok’s meteoric rise to popularity was founded on a never-ending stream of short videos tailored to catch users’ attention, the company has been pushing longer content for a while now.