TikTok maker ByteDance ropes in GroupM exec to rev up India monetisation

Beijing ByteDance Technology Co., developer of popular Chinese video app TikTok, has roped in media buying firm GroupM’s South Asia chief executive Sameer Singh as vice-president of monetisation for India.

Singh will be starting his role in the Beijing-based technology company come August, said the TikTok developer in a statement. He will lead the advertisement, sales and marketing strategies of all the technology company’s content platforms in India.

An alumnus of IIM Calcutta, Singh has worked at Gillette, Procter & Gamble, GlaxoSmithKline and Google in a career spanning 25 years.

“In India, ByteDance has transformed the way people create and interact with their content, and I believe that my experience will contribute to ByteDance’s promising journey in the market,” said Singh, who was a sales executive at Google.

Speaking of Singh’s appointment, Lidong Zhang, senior vice-president, ByteDance, said, “We are looking forward to working with him to bring ByteDance’s monetisation efforts in India across our various platforms such as TikTok and Helo to even greater heights.”

Founded in 2012 by Yiming Zhang, ByteDance has been pegged as the world’s most valuable internet startup, recently surpassing Uber to claim the title. It owns a number of machine-learning based social media apps such as Toutiao, Duoyin, a news aggregator app called News Republic and a range of other apps such as Vigo Video, Xigua Video, Duoshan, Faceu, Helo and Buzz Video.

In 2016, vernacular news aggregator app Dailyhunt raised $25 million from ByteDance. The following year, ByteDance consolidated its investment by buying out the stake held by Franklin Templeton’s equity arm in Dailyhunt for $19.2 million.

This April, ByteDance’s flagship product, TikTok, was given relief by the Madras High Court, which lifted a ban it had imposed three weeks ago on the app for obscene content.