ByteDance surpasses Meta to become world’s largest social media company by revenue

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok and other popular applications, has quietly emerged as the world's largest social media company by revenue in the first quarter of 2025. Unnamed sources indicate that ByteDance pulled in over $43 billion in the first three months of the year, narrowly surpassing Meta Platforms, which reported $42.31 billion for the same period.

The rise of ByteDance

In 2024, Meta earned $165 billion in annual revenue, just ahead of ByteDance’s $155 billion, but ByteDance’s growth trajectory has now outpaced Meta’s, with both companies maintaining growth rates above 20%.

TikTok, ByteDance’s most prominent international product, continues to dominate short-form video engagement and has steadily increased its ad monetization capabilities. Meanwhile, the company’s portfolio of apps, including Douyin in China, provides a strong domestic revenue stream that Meta simply can’t access.

Despite the revenue lead, ByteDance remains privately held and far less valuable on paper. Its recent share buyback pegged the company at a $315 billion valuation, a fraction of Meta’s $1.79 trillion market cap.

Valuation gap: Risk vs reward

That disparity reflects not just profitability and margins, but political risk. ByteDance remains under intense scrutiny in the United States, where President Donald Trump is leading a renewed push to force TikTok’s sale or face a national ban.

While ByteDance’s core businesses flourish globally, including in markets that Meta struggles to penetrate, the company’s regulatory headwinds remain a major obstacle to investor confidence.

The AI arms race

Beyond their advertising empires, both ByteDance and Meta are pouring billions into frontier AI development, betting that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and large language models (LLMs) will define the next era of competition.

ByteDance founder Yiming Zhang is personally overseeing the company’s push into general AI through a dedicated division known as Seed, which launched in 2023. The team is focused on long-term, foundational research, signaling ByteDance’s deepening commitment to cutting-edge AI.

On the other side of the world, Mark Zuckerberg has formed Meta’s Superintelligence team, reportedly recruiting researchers directly and pledging “hundreds of billions of dollars” toward building massive AI data centers.

“We have the capital from our business to do this,” Zuckerberg said last week, reinforcing how Meta’s ad engine continues to fund its AI dreams.

The same could be said for ByteDance. With its robust revenue streams and surging global user base, the company is in a strong position to compete in both social media and AI, the twin pillars of the digital future.

The future

ByteDance has quietly dethroned Meta in revenue, but whether it can maintain that lead depends not just on performance, but on how it navigates global regulation, public trust, and the increasingly high-stakes AI race.