ByteDance has announced the merger of its short video entertainment app, Vigo with Tik-Tok amidst the ongoing economic crisis. The application notified about the decision saying, “We want to thank you for the time you’ve spent with Vigo. It’s you who made us who we are today. We regret to inform you that we’ll discontinue our service after 31st October 2020.”
With this development, the app has allowed to transfer their videos from Vigo to Tik-Tok. It has also given an option of manually transferring the ‘diamonds’ from one app to the other. The economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the companies to make tough decisions to survive.
This merger by the world’s largest privately valued company in India has been announced at a time when almost all the major companies have started scaling themselves down by reducing workforce or removing loss-making businesses.
One of the venture capitalists who invested in a vernacular social media platform said, “This is a major sign of prioritising focus and getting rid of distraction. TikTok has grown to become India’s third most popular social network in India and a large chunk of its audience is also on Vigo. Bytedance is pulling the plug from Vigo is quite natural.”
India is Tik-Tok’s biggest market with over 200 million users and 600 million downloads from the country. Vigo has a userbase of 120 million across the globe with a good percentage from India. The app was introduced as ’Hipster’ in 2017.
ByteDance currently operates three products in India including Tik-Tok, Halo and Vigo. Tik-Tok and Vigo faced very little competition in market while Halo has a direct competitor in ShareChat which is backed by social media giant Twitter. After this merger, Tik-Tok is the biggest short video entertainment platform with very little competition.