The most remarkable thing about ByteDance is that it has extracted the only thing of value left on the poor—time.

In the past, a large number of poor people in China did not consume, or consumed very little. They had no money, so there was nothing to extract.

The emergence of Douyin, Toutiao, and Hongguo Short Drama has completely changed this.

The logic is simple: You have no money, but you always have time, right? Time is the fairest thing in the world. Even the poorest person can spend five or six hours a day on my app.

And these five or six hours are essentially working for ByteDance.

While you're scrolling videos, you are continuously producing data on one hand, feeding its algorithms; on the other hand, you are being brainwashed by the content it feeds you, becoming the monetizable attention within its advertising system.

You think you are consuming, but in fact, you are the one being consumed.

So it's not surprising at all that ByteDance has the highest valuation in all of China today. What it does is bring the bottom 70% of people, who have almost no spending power, back into the consumer market—settled with time.

What it has truly activated is the dormant effective demand within this group of people.