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.
Bro, Facebook facilitated a genocide, and this is who we want to buy TikTok? What action was taken against fb?
“US coRpOrAtiOn goOd!”
If TikTok’s purpose is to spread Chinese propaganda, can’t they just find a US Citizen that can run the website for them?
“Yeah, it’s my personal website where I exercise my 1st Amendment rights, also it has 100 million daily users and I happen to agree with China on a lot of things.” If a US Citizen were to say this, there would be nothing illegal about it I think?
5% of customers driving 25% of revenue is a market you want to invest in.
Amazon wasn’t profitable for how many years? It’s the exact same play. Take a loss to create something artificially desirable, strangle the competition and lock up your walled garden, then crank the prices.
I’ve talked with merchants TikTok Shop recruited, TikTok was paying them a ton to sell there, eating their processing fees, their shipping costs, and paying for massive discounts to customers so they could juice their metrics.
They’re starting to crank up their fees this spring and summer.
Same with advertising, advertisers want to go to TikTok, but I’m sure most of the actual spend is happening outside the app on influencers. TikTok wants that pie too.
Taking a loss means nothing in this context
