Twenty years after three ex-PayPal employees uploaded a clip from the San Diego Zoo, YouTube pays creators more than any studio and gets watched more than any TV network. Here is how the video site became infrastructure.
ByteDance is a Beijing-headquartered technology company behind TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, Lark, Toutiao and the Doubao family of AI models. Founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming and Liang Rubo, it built one of the world's most powerful content recommendation engines and grew into the largest social-media company by revenue, surpassing Meta in early 2026.