Li Liang refutes the claim of "Byte Time," while Qin Shuo states it is a very realistic fact

On the evening of October 27, Li Liang, Vice President of Douyin Group, responded on Weibo to media person and financial observer Qin Shuo's statement about "the Byte Time of China's Internet," calling it "extremely unrigorous and purely nonsense." Li Liang stated that no company can become the "xx time of China's Internet"; instant messaging has a relatively stable moat due to relationship chains, while short dramas and short videos belong to a fully competitive market with rapidly changing dynamics. He also mentioned that Tencent's growth rate in short dramas and short videos far exceeds that of Douyin and Hongguo, and that instant messaging, gaming, e-commerce, and music occupy a significant amount of user time. He later posted that Qin Shuo's analysis contains several fundamental common sense errors.

On the 26th, Qin Shuo published an article on his public account "Qin Shuo's Circle of Friends," citing QuestMobile data from a Nomura Securities report, stating that in July 2026, Douyin surpassed WeChat for the first time among the top 50 apps in China by mobile internet usage time, accounting for 19.4%, while WeChat accounted for 18.8%; the share of Byte's apps was 40.9%, and Tencent's was 29.1%. He questioned whether, despite WeChat's daily active users still exceeding Douyin's, China's Internet is shifting from Tencent time to Byte time, and from WeChat time to "Douyin + Hongguo time." This morning, Qin Shuo posted on social media that in the relevant rankings for August 2026, Byte's share was 41.8% and Tencent's was 28.6%, a difference of 13.2 percentage points. He believes that "Byte time" is a summary of Byte's total usage time share exceeding 40%, which is "a very realistic fact," while emphasizing that the share of user time does not equate to the share of user value.

On the same day, Hongguo Short Drama, a platform under ByteDance, issued a statement saying that the claims circulating online about "annual revenue approaching 40 billion yuan" and "this year's revenue reaching 42 to 45 billion yuan" are inaccurate, and that the related comparisons, calculations, and extended interpretations lack factual basis. They stated that most of the current revenue continues to be used for content creator revenue sharing, copyright guarantees, and support for high-quality content. Data from third-party institutions shows that as of July 2026, Hongguo Short Drama had 168 million daily active users, a year-on-year increase of 107%. On October 19, Liu Xing, head of public relations at Doubao, responded to the claim that "over half of the domestic computing power is used to create feel-good dramas," stating that the data is unreliable, and that for Byte, only about 10% of the company's total computing power is used for training and inference of video generation models.