Bytedance

My initial interest in ByteDance was the observation of multiple visits to this website from the ByteDance spider.

Having looked at the ByteDance website I was puzzled to see why there was such a strange way of presenting their pages. Firstly I noted that they had suppressed the scrollbars on their home page and to see the content you had to scroll down as you would on a mobile screen. Then, on futher investigation, I see that ByteDance are the company behind TikTok and now it makes a lot more sense.

2023, the majority of spider visits recorded in my server logs seem to originate for bytedace.com

At first I thought that the accesses were from a regular visitor as all the components of the webpage, to css, the images as well as the HTML file were being retrieved.

Top

Robot behaviour:

The access by googlebot, for my page vitaly_popov.html is shown in the black bubble, the bytedance in the red bubble, for the page st_edmund.html plus others

SEO Services

ByteDance probably offer these - see their website. There is far more to this

The speculation that there was some SEO related reason for their spiders interest in my site turns out to be more sinister than I first thought. What with the alligations made against them and the likes of TikTok and other Social Media and AI technolgies, it is no wonder that they should be treated with muc suspicion.

For some reason the ByteDance website turns off the browser scroll bar. I am not sure why you would want to do this. Actually, I can now see why you might want to suppress the scrollbar and I have done so on my hose page.

The ByteDance Company

What ByteDance say on their website:

ByteDance was founded in 2012 by a team led by Yiming Zhang and Rubo Liang, who saw opportunities in the then-nascent mobile internet market, and aspired to build platforms that could enrich people's lives. The company launched Toutiao, one of its flagship products, in August 2012. It followed that success with the launch of Douyin in September 2016. Approximately a year later, ByteDance accelerated globalization with the launch of its global short video product, TikTok. It quickly took off in markets like Southeast Asia, signaling a new opportunity for the company. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 and subsequently merged it with TikTok. Today, the TikTok platform, which is available outside of China, has become the leading destination for short-form mobile videos worldwide.

What Wikipedia say:

ByteDance Ltd. is a Chinese internet technology company headquartered in Haidian, Beijing, and incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

Founded by Zhang Yiming, Liang Rubo, and a team of others in 2012, ByteDance developed the video-sharing apps TikTok, Douyin. The company is also the developer of the news platform Toutiao, the video-editing app CapCut, and Lemon8 which is a video sharing mobile app.

ByteDance has attracted regulatory and media attention in several countries over security, surveillance, and censorship concerns

Bytedance

Links