ByteDance on the other hand is making pretty good profits and has $80B in ARR and ~$25B EBITDA with a $220B valuation. Douyin is a cash cow, TikTok...not so much. It comes down to monetization methods where Douyin relies heavily on ecommerce and advertisers, and TikTok seems to rely on advertisers mainly. However, 150M Americans are on TikTok and watch time per user per day is very high. Risk factors still exist for ByteDance. For instance, there's regulatory pressure against TikTok in the US, Australia, India etc. On the flip side, ByteDance can be subject to the same crackdown from the Chinese government as Tencent and Alibaba. From a business standpoint, it's still very tough to monetize SFV. Competitors like YouTube and Meta are losing hope on SFV monetization. TikTok is moving over to longer videos (up to 10 minutes), which suggests it's trying to compete against YouTube. Work culture aside, it seems like TikTok's business has a lot of risk factors here.
TikTok run by the CCP, they don’t need to be profitable. They just have to make up the difference in strategic importance derailing the US. CCP will just continue pumping them full of money as long as fits their security interests.
This is also why there is a very real chance it doesn’t exist in the US in the near future. It’s not a startup, it’s a corporate extension of an adversarial government.
Agreed.
it’s a ‘generational’ thing. once this generation goes above certain age, and new one becomes prime, there will be new toolb that replace the current cool tool, new social media celebrities that will rise up on that platform. current ones will get too old to be cool or active or rich and move on the cycle seems to be like 10-15 yearsb frequency
Most of the $80B comes from douyin which is SFV
Sfv?
Flawed analysis and equally flawed poll.
Definitely more than 3 years, but probably less than 10 years
I really hope TikTok can make live shopping work in US, this will bring a new wave of tech growth. But the chance is pretty low
live shopping in US has pretty much failed as all big players have tried it, insta shuttered it as you might know there isn’t a startup big enough that’s disrupting the live commerce
it'll also fail in china now that the yuan ponzi is over and the price of rice and pork 10x's from deglobalized supply chains hard to socialize over purchasing useless bullshit when youre starving