ByteDance refocuses on education apps in China amid trouble overseas

ByteDance is having a rough year abroad. Its star app TikTok is being targeted by authorities in India, the US, and beyond. Facing headwinds overseas, the company is now looking to bolster its status back home with a focus on one particular area: online education.

Photo credit: Bytedance

ByteDance recently launched two new learning apps in China.

Xuelang offers one- to two-hour livestreamed classes for elementary to high school students. Professional knowledge courses are also available for adults in topics like sales.

Qingbei Xiaoban, on the other hand, focuses on small online classes. The teacher of each class is responsible for no more than 25 students. The goal is to offer more specialized attention to each student, according to the app description on Apple’s iOS App Store.

Over the last couple of years, ByteDance has built up an army of online education products. To set itself apart from its more established rivals, it has tried to draw on its experience building entertainment apps like TikTok. The secret sauce of these apps relies on an endless scroll of targeted content picked by AI algorithms.

One example is Tangyuan English, which was launched a year ago.

When the app first launched, the platform offered English tutoring videos in a vertical format, Chinese tech news site 36Kr reported. The video section pulls English-language videos straight from Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. It also reportedly uses AI to analyze and grade users’ spoken English.

But that’s not all. The app now has a chat function called “practice spoken English” that works like Tinder or Chatroulette for language partners.

Users are required to upload real pictures of themselves – animal or celebrity photos won’t do. Once their accounts are approved, they’re asked which gender they’d like to be paired with (you can select both). After that, they’re being presented with profiles that they can like or dislike. Alternatively, users can just choose the “instant chat” feature and be paired up with a random stranger in a video call – apparently to practice English.

Tangyuan is an outlier, though. Most of ByteDance’s education apps are less adventurous. One of them is the one-on-one English tutoring app Gogokid, a competitor of the more widely known VIPKid.

ByteDance aggressively promotes Gogokid on Douyin with the help of Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi, the platform’s brand ambassador. But not even enlisting the help of one of China’s most recognizable film stars has helped Gogokid gain significant ground. The platform reportedly laid off at least half of its employees last year. The company said it was bringing its staff numbers into a “normal range.”

Another recent addition to ByteDance’s suite of education services is GuaguaLong. This platform targets kids between the ages of two and eight by featuring an animal in its tutoring videos. ByteDance also heavily promotes this platform, with ads appearing on some of China’s most popular reality TV shows.

Despite the new products, ByteDance still doesn’t have any education products that have achieved the same level of success as that of TikTok’s or Douyin’s.