Oh no! Anyway…
TikTok’s daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance’s DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.
So much drama in the US over this but it’s apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.
It’s almost like making money is not the primary purpose of this website 🤔
Or … maybe the US isn’t the only country in the world?
Lmao yeah OK 👍. Name any other country.
I have a Geography degree lmao, but also, you’re an asshole. I don’t even know what you’re trying to accomplish with this comment.
he’s being sarcastic (im pretty sure)
This means absolutely nothing.
How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US. They have shopping, I’ll bet the US buys the most.
China already has livestream shopping, it’s still relatively novel in the US. Bytedance has to compete with other local competitors in China, hating a nice external source of revenue in the US fuelling these Chinese battle is a huge boon.
I know the article says loss making app, but I bet a lot of money goes back to R&D creating the loss. They pay massive sums to get merchants to sell on their app for example.
This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.
To quote the article again, “The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge.” Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn’t in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It’s likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven’t been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn’t bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it’s still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it’s just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.
You’re assuming its a profit-focused endeavor rather than a propaganda arm of the Chinese government.
I think it’s a privately-owned, profit-focused endeavor that is nevertheless beholden to the Chinese government and which the government wants to take as much advantage of as possible. Deep down, I’m certain that their sole goal is to make as much money for themselves as they possibly can. If they also need to exfiltrate some data and send it to the CCP, that’s just a necessary business expense.
Looks like they’re saying it’s running at a loss and is valued at $50b, so that Musk would end up buying it off their hands.
It’s going to be to their advantage to claim that they’re shutting down, even if they actually want that $50B buyout. If they say they’re going to sell, they’re going to lose what little leverage they have left. The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
I read it as a bluff too.
They’re between a rock and a hard place, their best position is to play hardball and rile up their users.
Yeah, it means nothing to us to leave. We’re losing money!
If that were really the case why are they in the US at all? Because they know they can make money and their market position is strong.
When you’re forced to participate in capitalism, your only option is to play the game. I agree, this is mostly just a bluff.
The public that wants TikTok will get TikTok, and the public is going to stop pestering politicians about it.
Has their user base mobilized at all? Maybe it’s just because I don’t use TikTok but I haven’t really heard much from their users about the ban. Which has been kind of unexpected.
Apparently TikTok sent out push notifications telling users to call their representatives. Minors were being provided instructions with their representatives’ phone numbers and contact info, but didn’t even know who they were calling and were asking basic questions like “What is Congress?”
Kind of shows the amount of power TikTok has over American youth.
I love how they demonstrated they aren’t influencing people by sending out a mass message telling people what to do. It doesn’t get any more comical than that.
So be it. The vaccuum it will leave will get filled by another platform.
This is obviously a negotiation tactic.
If ByteDance doesn’t want to sell their stupid algorithm, they could simply rip it out of TikTok, replace it with a random number generator or any other off-the-shelf recommendation engine, and proceed with the sale.
Find their lowest paid summer intern from the university computer science department, tell him to write some sort of recommendation algorithm and he has two weeks to do it, then whatever he comes up with make it live and that’s all the new owner gets.
Great news for Loops!
Do it.
Makes sense from a business point of view. Why sell to create a new competitor with the same technology and an impregnable market base in the USA?
Better to force US competition to start from scratch.
For money. Whoever buys it has to pay you for it. Shutting down just means leaving a gaping hole in American social media that some other company will fill and you’ll be in the same position but with less money.
Yeah I agree, there really is no incentive for a for-profit company to choose shutting down over selling. Unless they never cared about profit and had ulterior motives from the very beginning.
