ByteDance's growth hack that got them tens of millions of users:

working with distributors to pre-install their flagship news app Toutiao in mid-tier Android phones at $0.06 per install 

qDAU or not is another question but interesting case study.

(started reading this book during my flight)

Interesting!

Kinda reminds me of the time U2 partnered with Apple to auto-download their album to 500M iTunes accounts

Did TikTok face any backlash from this?

Building /presto /fc-marketplace || Believe in magic

that U2 example is a good one! 

the book didnt mention any backlash but what came out of this tactic:
1. competitors decided to incentivise "activation" instead of installs - but ByteDance doubled down on just installs so it's more lucrative for distributors
2. because they were onboarding so many users, brainrot became extremely prevalent. everything was kinda clickbaity because their users wanted those sorts of content.

yeah competition in the chinese tech industry is probably 10x more brutal than the west’s so i could see why they had to be extra creative 

also important to note that Toutiao’s their news app which is different than TikTok/Douyin.

So it sounds like the decision to optimize installs was "good" from the POV of giving advertisers distribution, but "bad" from the POV of quality content

The more users they onboarded, the lower the average quality of content

Makes sense given where TikTok is today