First question arises in our mind is what is musical.ly as from the name we think something related to music or art yes you are right musical.ly is video/music sharing platform like Facebook/ Youtube / Instagram small lengths video are Uploaded here, and from these small videos the platform got bigger and bigger so what is the reason behind their great success lets find out.
History
Musical.ly was founded by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang, ago Zhu and Yang motive to create an education social network app, through which user share their educational videos short(3-5 min) but this idea didn't create too much hype and not able to engage too much audience so, they turned their mind towards the entertainment industry, targeting the US teenage, as youth easily adopt the new trends. Musical.ly was officially launched in August 2014.
Target audience
Basically, musical.ly target the teenage group, below 21 years of age and people above 21 years of age didn't hear about it too much. On January 28, 2016, Business Insider released a survey, in which "30 out of the 60 {Interviewed teenagers} listed Musical.ly as the app they were most excited about.
Investment
On Jan 30, 2014, they get their first "Seed Round " Investment of $250K
On Aug 27, 2015, they get "Series B" Investment of $16.6m
In May 13,206 "Series C" Investment of $130m
On Dec 19, 2017, Musical.ly Creator fund $50m
Users
m = million They have total users of 200m out of this 50m are teenagers and they have 66m active users out of this 12m videos are uploaded daily, this is a huge amount and the interesting part is that out of the total users 70% of are female now you can think about how they attract more and more users, the average retention time a users use this app is 3.30 minutes.
Money making formulae
Everyone wants to make money, so for this musical.ly launched their another platform live.ly where the top musical.ly users get life, and the viewers who watch their live broadcasting donates money to them but how? Here is the answer / The viewers first purchase the coins (100 coins = $1) and they use coins to purchase emoji and sent to the live broadcaster which means viewers gift their money in form of emoji to live broadcaster and out of the total money collected by the live broadcaster 50% money is get to the musical.ly and rest of the user.
Growth
On 2015, the app began to attract millions of users and in July 2015, musical.ly climbed up to the number 1 position in the iOS App Store,becoming the most-downloaded free app in over 30 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, Philippines, and Japan. In July 2016, musical.ly reached 90 million downloads, with over 12 million new videos posted every day.
In June 2016, Coca-Cola launched its #ShareACoke campaign on musical.ly, which introduced musical.ly’s “User-Generated Ads” model. On July 24, 2016, during VidCon, musical.ly officially launched live.ly, its new live video streaming platform. Although this was intended to be a soft launch, as no additional marketing had been done for this new product, live.ly climbed up to the number one position in the iOS App Store within 3 days.
On November 9, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported that Musical.ly Inc had agreed to be acquired by Bytedance Technology Co. for as much as US $1 billion.Bytedance operates the program Toutiao. Recode estimated that the sale would be for around US$800 million.
