TikTok has recently traded at valuations of $105-110B on private markets | Hacker News Reader

TikTok has recently traded at valuations of $105-110B on private markets

bloomberg.com

107 pointsLogicRiver147 comments

I really can't fathom how this is possible. The largely young demographic (which I'm guessing warrants this valuation) has a track record of jumping from platform to platform, whichever is trendy for a given year.

With that in mind, how are investors seriously willing to get behind this company in such a big way?

I'm largely with you, although maybe they're thinking of YouTube in the scene that it has stuck around for a while.

Wasn't the same said about Facebook?

> has a track record of jumping from platform to platform

do they really though? It honestly seems like particular brands are very sticky with internet demographics, not just young people.

IIRC there even is more brand loyalty among ecommerce than there is among physical brick and mortar stores.

You can look at something like Whatsapp as well. There have been lots of privacy concerns after the acquisition by Facebook but the number of people who actually switch to say, Signal is very low. There are huge network effects to these social media / communications platforms, and TikTok already has 1.5 billion users worldwide.

In my experience, the claim that the younger generation hops around is fair. I'm 26. Between the ages of 15 and now, my primary social media platform has hopped between Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, YouTube, some diary site, PSN(PlayStation Network), Hacker News, and probably others. I've dipped my toes into countless other ones. I've kind of stopped hopping around as much, but other people my age still hop between newer ones like Instagram, tiktok, and others.

> some diary site

LiveJournal?

Nah, some other one. I know what it is, but I don't want it to leak in case someone associates this account with my real identity.

> I've kind of stopped hopping around as much

So at 26, you're getting old? :)

That isn't true. Outside of teens in tech or nerdy places, most won't switch to the next hyped thing. I have been trying to get people on session and pleroma but most of them don't care.

1.5 billion users already. That's staggering!

Facebook was able to leverage their popularity with college students into a larger platform that had mass appeal with all age groups. I don't see why TikTok can't add features and get the same results.

Facebook has network effect, TikTock doesn't really.

Facebook is really centered around 'everyone you might know' including friends and family, whereas I doubt parents and grandparents will ever go onto TikTok.

Most importantly, TikTok is not basic communications tool, it's a specialized communications tool honed on a timely and probably faddish trend.

Facebook may or may may not survive, but TikTok will have to transform to make it for the long haul.

Will most likely branch out into all the other usual markets, TikTok chat, TikTok meetings, TikTok Ads, TikTok shops, TikTok news, TikTok Pay, etc. Basically another slightly different version of the same stuff we're all used to with these kinds of social platforms. Still.. >100Bn is simultaneously ridiculous, funny and sad imho.

EDIT: valuation makes a bit more sense for the parent company seeing as it has a lot of other brands that are huge in China and India

None of those things are a given, moreover, you could say the same about almost any digital company.

"$176.9 million in revenue in 2019" - Forbes, Jan 16.

This is another SoftBank fake unicorn.

This time, they can hide behind the smoke and mirrors of the HK Stock Exchange and non-existent Chinese standard accounting principles.

Instagram doesn't have the same network effect as Facebook. Snapchat does have Quick Add, which shows people you might know; it's also a much more communication-driven platform.

TikTok is probably the modern Instagram replacement, not the modern Facebook replacement.

The barrier to making TikToks is much higher than for Instagram posts. It takes hours to make a decent TikTok; it takes second to make a decent Instagram Story post. For that reason, I see TikTok as more adjacent to YouTube than Instagram.

YikYak is another possible path for it to go.

Feel free to invest wherever you want, but personally I don't have the stomach for it.

> YikYak is another possible path for it to go.

People complained about YikYak being anonymous. The problem is that YikYak listened to the complaints rather than their users.

Every social media company upsets its users at some point. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Digg. The moat, platform stickiness, and competition shape outcomes.

Facebook solved the core problem of real identity on the web. Extending outside colleges was a natural progression (first to workplaces, then to high schools, then publicly).

TikTok solves the problem of short form video creation / entertainment. Will their userbase be interested in creating the same type of content in 4-5 years? I think they'll struggle the same way Snapchat struggles to convince people over 35 to use their app.

... yeah and Vine.

and keek..

> I think they'll struggle the same way Snapchat struggles to convince people over 35 to use their app.

Have you used TikTok lately? It's overwhelmed with millennial/elder millennial and beyond. I don't see this as a problem for them and in fact I think people are jumping over to it in droves.

> elder millennial

The only time I feel old is when other people tell me I'm old.

Don't worry. You are still young and rockin'

Thanks :)

Everyone is locked up at home with their phone at the moment.

So current TikTok trends may be atypical.

> millennial/elder millennia

Is this redundant or is the latter the new term for Gen X from the people who believe that the world is divided between Boomers and Millennials, so everyone else must be a “young millenial”, “elder millenial”, or “advanced boomer”?

TikTok is a bit headache inducing for anyone not under 20. Anyway I don't think humans should be receiving that much stimulation, and information overload in such short bursts.

TikTok is fun. If you're not on it, it's hard to understand.

Snapchat is fun. If you're not on it, it's hard to understand.

X is fun for the next 4 days. If you're not on it, you're uncool and don't jump on whatever is popular because it's popular.

X =

Email#

IRC#

ICQ

AIM

Yahoo Messenger

Friendster

MSN Messenger

MySpace

Flickr

Orkut

Google Talk

Skype

Google Wave

Facebook

Youtube#

Twitter#

Vimeo#

G+

Periscope

Vine

Instagram

Snapchat

TikTok

Zoom

# Only exceptions, so far

I wouldn't list IRC as an exception. Every IRC channel I've ever tried using has been dead.

Periscope was never fun

Tumblr, Discord, Slack, Ello, Telegram, Badoo, FormSpring, iTunes Ping, FriendFeed, Diaspora, Bebo, Path, Meerkat, VK, Google Buzz, CryptoKitties... The list goes on and on.

I am on it. As a platform, it doesn't hold a candle to TikTok.

I tried it multiple times, but I've always got low-quality-video fatigue when after have seen the same dance moves 20 times by different people for the same music.

With Youtube I can watch conference videos that contain genuinely new content forever, but I don't see that happening with TikTok. Also it spams my mobile notifications, so I had to delete it, even though I don't delete too many apps.

For young people who have their friends on it, it's probably fun to see them, but for me I just hope that forced TikTok integration won't be the next one on Tinder.

You need to be really careful how you tailor it (what you like, hashtags you look up, who you follow, what videos you watch all the way through or multiple times).

Repetition paired with a slight twist is much more addictive than novel content. See: memes, pop music, MCU, etc.

Scroll past the ones that bore you, or long press and hit "not interested", and the for you page will improve.

> conference videos

TikTok is for killing time and having fun. If you're learning on TikTok it's by accident. The videos are limited to a minute, ffs. That's why it's fun and it's good that people who take it too seriously are put off by the format and leave.

> I had to delete it

You can curate the apps allowed to notify you on your phone. For me, my phone makes a noise when someone is calling me (a good old-fashioned phone call) and that is the only notification I allow. If you're deleting apps for that, you're missing out.

> young people who have their friends on it

You're thinking of snap. Young people don't have their friends on tiktok, they are mostly hoping not to meet people they know on there so they don't get in trouble for how they use it.

When a platform captures the leisure of young people, it develops a culture with its own conventions and art. TikTok is the first platform I've been excited by since early Twitter. The fact that old people don't get it is a huge benefit. TikTok doesn't want your boring conference videos.

I've been on it. It's kinda boring, the videos are so short and are like gifs.

I've been getting into more ig live lately. It seems to be the latest popular thing. Live long videos of stars are hot.

This was my first reaction also but making a quick google search it seems that TikTok has 500 million users. That's a lot. Doing a pretty simple calculation of a dollar per user per day, you arrive quickly at 180 billion dollars of advertising monetization a year. It is really just another scale. But yeah, maybe i am way off and the valuation is still absurd.

Where did you get that “simple calculation” from? If Average user is worth to TikTok a dollar per day that means that ad buyers are willing to give it to TikTok from their advertising and marketing budget. Which means that the average user should spend at least few grands each year on advertised products and services, which does not seem likely.

Also, this is not how valuations are estimated. 180 billion _per year_ is a huge amount (for comparison Apple revenue for 2019 is 260B). One applies a revenue multiple that depends on the stage of the company and industry but for early booming social media site is in the range of 20-40. So the estimate of 105-110 probably comes from the range of 3-5 B yearly revenue estimate

let's not quibble over semantics of "simple"

anyway the valuation clearly must include investor perception of their growth trajectory.

I think the more appropriate wording would be "completely pulled out of thin air and not relevant calculation"

An averge tiktok user doesn't make a dollar a day not sure they have the most valuable userbase.

Yes, that's correct. A dollar per day is huge, and that would bring the valuation close to a revenue multiple of one, which is madness by market standards. If you would make it 10 cents per day, which seems more reasonable according to people more informed than me, that would become simply a multiple of 10, which is still low, as you pointed it out. We can keep changing the variables, divide it by 2 even, but the point i tried to make is that it seems not that crazy of a valuation after all if you consider 500mi users as an average

180b/0.5 = each user (including inactive ones) worth 1$/day?

$1/user/day is a huge overestimate. Facebook manage a fraction of that.

200M DAU so way above 500M users

One dollar per day!? That's an obscenely high level. Facebook is one of the highest revenue per user social media companies by orders if magnitude and they made worldwide an average of 7.26 per user in an entire financial quarter, which is like 8 or 9 cents per day. If tiktok is outdoing facebook by a full order of magnitude, and has 1/5th the users, even with identical growth expectations they'd be twice the valuation at like 1.2 trillion dollars. A couple billion in revenues plus investor belief in growth potential is more than enough to justify a 105 billion dollar valuation (nobody said investors can't overvalue companies either, look at wework). I dont think they're anywhere near as obscenely profitable as making a dollar per day across all international users, they're going to be orders of magnitude removed from that.

I wonder what the amount spent by users on advertised products per quarter is... presumably more but that seems like a lot especially if that is worldwide.

i see four scenarios:

1. insanity 2. lies about numbers 3. massive invasive data siphoning and thats actually the basis for the valuation 4. tiktok now has a license to vast raw video and personal data that users granted them the right to use and resell in perpetuity. They obviously don't just keep edited but also raw data, videos never published, maybe even entire camera rolls. So much data held by a company sheltered behind the Chinese state's protection from legal repercussions.

or of course all of the above.

Scenario 5: you didn't read beyond the misleading headline to see that it's ByteDance, who own TikTok, and who did $20bn of revenue in 2019 (implying a 5x multiple on valuation).

ByteDance isn't just TikTok, which is what the headline doesn't include. They also own Toutiao (Chinese news/content platform, top 100 website in China), Helo (Indian social media, the Google Play app alone has 2.2M reviews), Lark (https://www.larksuite.com/, an enterprise collaboration platform aimed at the Japanese market).

ByteDance did $20bn of revenue in 2019. The comments in this thread are… wow. Lots of opinions from my favourite HN cameo character, "Person With Vitally Important Opinions About Complex Topic But No Time To Read Beyond The Headline."

True, but I'm sure that Bloomberg's paywall isn't helping on that front.

The paywall issue is listed in the FAQ - as long as there's a workaround it's acceptable

Given that Facebook has a market cap of 650 B the valuation sounds reasonable ... maybe even cheap.

Nice! My usual trick for estimating a companies value is to multiply it's revenue by 10.

I highly doubt it's operating hosts are eating into the revenue that much so I'd say they're highly undervalued.

The valuation is for TikTok's parent company ByteDance which has a large number of products and investments including a really popular news aggregation app in China.

Also, TikTok in China, which is its largest market, is popular with everyone, young and old. It got to the point of threatening WeChat. CEOs of Tencent and ByteDance had a huge spat a while back.

Yeah I wonder about this too.

This time last year (or was it the year before that?) it was Snapchat (remember Snapchat? Kids don't) that was going to take over the world and be bigger than Apple + Facebook + Google combined etc etc. I don't think that worked out really.

I am guessing that investors just pile in wherever the "youth" are without paying too much attention to what it really is they are investing in... just hoping to get in early on the next big thing I suppose

>remember Snapchat? Kids don't

And yet, SNAP stock is up YoY.

Snapchat is still massive and influential. My snapchat username is still probably the first thing people my age will ask me for. Yes of course it’s not as influential as facebook or google, since it only has one product, but don’t act like youth no longer use snapchat.

Source: I’m youth

It's mostly a US centric thing though

Ironically I just took a look at Snap and out of five consecutive advertisements, four were for Tiktok.

In my opinion Tiktok is a viable replacement for Instagram, a platform that generates on the order of 10B USD revenue a year. They both have pub/sub models where you can follow topics or celebrities or content creators you care about. Instagram is more photo focused and Tiktok is more video focused. The video first format is arguably higher fidelity/more compelling for content consumers.

Yes, people jump from platform to platform. Instagram will not be king forever, but it will be generating massive amounts of money both on the upswing and the downswing.

Tiktok is also MORE popular than instagram worldwide

I have been watching white people hired by chinese marketing firms on tiktok. It's hilarious.

https://youtu.be/xZ3RbDTc_fY

https://youtu.be/Mrx4ld3hmmw

https://youtu.be/VC-6zkDewBQ

https://youtu.be/xZ3RbDTc_fY?t=200

"This isn't even my real hair color!"

You don't say. Holy hell, this is scary.

The tendency of young people to jump from platform to platform is partially an illusion caused by the fact they don’t remain young. You see this especially in dating sites — people used to think OkCupid could never make money because it was dominated by 18-to-25-year-olds. Now it’s mostly people in their 30’s, and the prior king of 30-somethings, Match.com, is for people over 40. The same thing happened with Tinder, PlentyOfFish, etc.

TikTok isn’t a dating site, but it’s certainly “flirty”. It has specific appeal to socially active teenagers and nearly all of the content shows off suitability for dating: looks, dancing, fashion, wit, etc. I could imagine adding paywalls to men contacting desirable women, or of course just padding the feeds of less valuable users with ads.

> padding the feeds of less valuable users with ads

This is horrifying when you consider this happens in every avenue of life and will only become better targeted as technology progresses.

It’s less horrifying if you think of it as a treadmill — MySpace is sort of the logical extreme, where the owners realized its days were numbered and made the experience so ad-heavy that everyone left for other platforms. You sow growth for some number of years, then you reap. Sometimes it’s subscriptions, sometimes it’s sponsored full-page branding.

Sorry, I wasn't making the claim about a product.

People that are more socially valuable are given a better experience and are treated better; kind of the social media "red carpet" treatment. Those that are less valuable are mined and exploited.

I can imagine an insidious future where social networks assign an "intelligence score" to users and advertise snake oil to those with less capacity to evaluate risks. There might even be a market for those users. A number of companies in the mobile gaming space profit from exploiting "whales". Imagine buying and selling them as targets.

Similarly, networks might evolve to give positive experiences to users that create content. We already have that in the form of monetization and karma. The economy rewards value creators.

But imagine being algorithmically put in place.

That gives me the creeps.

What makes you think this hasn't already happened? Advertising can both create and meet demand. A large portion of social media advertising came from mobile gaming companies, relying on the targeted profiles available on social platform, to find people who could be converted into whales.

I think Twitch could be a valid comparison to TikTok. Both are content-focused platforms that draw in audiences from a variety of somewhat non-overlapping demographics, but exist in the same space. They've already branched out into livestreaming, and I think a logical next step would be leaning even heavier into Twitch-style community building features while simultaneously promoting the app's base of viral social media video content.

Nothing else to get behind.

What happens if Chinese big tech starts dominating the world? Since the US no longer dominates manufacturing, if the US starts losing in services too, what advantage will the US ever have on China?

That's where we are at. Thankfully modern economic theory has the best interest of the US at heart. I'm sure the more we offshore the better it will get for all of us here, I mean it just makes sense.

This is an excellent question, but more pertinent is the fact that these companies are state-sponsored, state-backed.

The CCP/China views these apps as a serious tool of foreign policy and economic expansion, influence and control.

Imagine if Trump had meetings with Apple CEO and was subsidizing their product, creating worker legislation for them, directing/requiring banks to fund them, using the foreign service to help cut deals and suppress competitors etc., controlling/censoring everything in the AppStore.

This happens everywhere to some extent but it's very real for China.

It would be fine if some 'large, great Chinese companies' started doing some great things but that isn't really the case, this will be a form of economic dumping, state collusion and strategy.

It's a serious issue that 'old economy' Trump is nowhere close to understanding.

We don't want to get hyper-nationalist on the other hand, we can't afford to ignore the real systematic issues either, and only a very firm hand will be able to make a difference. This is in a way the paradox of Trump - he's the only US leader, arguably through bluster and arrogance - to be able to actually stand up to some systematic Chinese intransigence.

> It's a serious issue that 'old economy' Trump is nowhere close to understanding.

Politics aside Trump is the first US President to stand up to China.

The question is will US corporations do the same?

US Corporations do not have the power to 'stand up to China'.

People need to start to understand that when it comes to major international players, over $50B, that are related to state actors - then it's a geopolitical question as much as an economic one.

TikTok is not just a company, it's a strategic arm of the Chinese government.

China 'divides and conquers' and pushes ruthlessly on any and all entities in pursuit of its goals. They coordinate student groups on Western Uni campuses to oversee Chinese students, suppress any ideas or policies in their way. They threaten any politician, and the press from publishing or making statements they're not happy with.

They use the 'carrot' of access to their huge market, but often this is a ruse - as they require foreign companies to hand over IP to local companies, this IP filters into the hands of state-backed competitors and the entrant never has an opportunity. All of this is in blatant contradiction to WTO terms.

The Western companies that have made inroads are ones that have a lot of brand value, think McDonald's or Disney, but even then, China can have leverage: Big Hollywood films are made for global audiences, and China is a big market over which the government censors and controls content. China dictate terms to major Hollywood studios - and said studios comply - or are banned. It's that simple.

"If you do not promote our policies, and portray China a certain way, you do not get access to our market. So here is how you are going to portray us: ..."

Only the US President or the leader of the EU with the backing of the German Chancellor has the hope of applying pressure on China in any serious way. The Europeans won't so it's down to the US president.

Trump is blustering, nationalist, and not quite focused on the right things in 'standing up to China' and I think he might be doing it for some of the wrong reasons, nevertheless, he is doing it, and actually it is working. He has mostly a competent team doing it.

China's tactics have made a lot of talk behind closed doors around the world and even Dems, Europeans - everyone - is actually happy about this.

Sadly, it may be that the next administration may not have the wherewithal to continue to push for better terms because it does require a fairly steadfast and aggressive approach inconsistent with the personal manner of say, a guy like Obama, whom I admire quite a lot, but who I don't think will do what is needed.

Assume that anything you say on Zoom or TikTok could be made available fairly readily to the Chinese government and that they will leverage control of TikTok for whatever reason they want, consistent with their overall geopolitical strategy.

> Assume that anything you say on Zoom or TikTok could be made available fairly readily to the Chinese government and that they will leverage control of TikTok for whatever reason they want, consistent with their overall geopolitical strategy.

Don’t have to assume. It is made

Soon Tiktok will be banned in the US by an act proposed by FB lobbyists.

Smart for them to hire an American CEO, though. But I still believe FB has more lobbyists.

Another possible outcome is they will be forced to sell TikTok to some holding companies in the US.

What's the worst that can happen?

China banning US services seems to have worked out just fine for their tech industry, so maybe more countries should do that, not fewer.

Yeah, I don't really blame them for taking control of their citizens' data and keeping the revenue within borders versus shipping it out to American corporations.

I've been saying this myself for a while now. Take the EU for example. Why doesn't the EU have a silicon valley rivaling our silicon valley? They have a larger population and a larger economy. Not only can they afford to invest in their silicon valley, they have a market to sustain it. Where is their facebook, google, apple, youtube, etc? Even more baffling is india. The US has a lot of indian tech workers. Why doesn't india bring some home and build their own tech giants. Instead their major "tech" companies are outsourcing companies which essentially "sells" indian workers all over the world. Why not use those workers to build indian tech companies? Why isn't there an indian whatsapp? Why did india hand that market over to facebook? None of this makes any sense.

If they don't want to follow the "chinese model" because of any perceived stigma attached to it, then follow our model. The US became an economic powerhouse due to protectionism. Every major economy in the world developed under protectionism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism_in_the_United_St...

I used to think it was because politicians are old and think tech is magic, but I'm just starting to believe most of them are outright lazy and incompetent.

Europe is fragmented not only by language but by law, culture and other things as well... It's not trivial to be available to all europe at once (Spotify/Netflix for example are not available in several eastern european countries)

World's largest navy and control of global oil shipping. That and some pretty advanced and battle tested military technology and the world's largest arms industry.

The US can easily block these apps. Why not? Western apps are blocked in China.

As others have mentioned, this hacker news headline is deceptive. The valuation is with respect to ByteDance, which has a business suite beyond TikTok. Even the article headline mentions this: "TikTok Owner’s Value Exceeds $100 Billion in Private Markets"

There are other facts about ByteDance such as having nearly 100k employees and a moderately size AI research lab that makes this news less surprising.

>moderately size AI research lab

Isn't their AI lab actually quite good? If I remember correctly, they create personalized news stories that are actually read and consumed.

It isn't an ultimate metric, but they have 150+ papers listed on google scholar, which is not a small amount. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=byt...

TikTok proved to be a perfect secret clubhouse for Gen Z sensibilities of humor, nihilism, and celebration of differences. But as older generations pile on that do not pass the "vibe check", it is already slowly starting to ruin the party. It's still the best party in town, but hopefully ByteDance is humble enough to realize TikTok's success is about a lucky coupling of a format and cultural moment.

If what you’re saying is true, then in a sense a lot of these apps are like the Seinfeld of the time. Eventually the season finale happens, and very few end up being a Simpsons (Facebook).

Profit while you can I guess.

Seinfeld still makes good money though.

I don't necessarily agree with this. I know several people that get their daily news through Snapchat. Tiktok rewards viral content, unlike Facebook which just blasts everything your friends do on the platform into your timeline. I think the signal is much higher on tiktok.

> It’s the first salvo of ByteDance’s goal to reach 100,000 staff globally by the end of the year, outlined by Chief Executive Officer Zhang Yiming in an internal memo last month.

Can someone explain to me the rationale behind such an aggressive employee headcount? Do they have larger ambitions or are they trying to justify the valuation? It just strikes me at an incredibly large number of employees for the service.

It's not their only product.

If they employed the moderators instead of contracting them out, I think that number would make more sense. I'm not sure if they do or not.

ByteDance has a huge suite of apps already (in China). Several of them could independently be unicorns without international expansion. I don't see why they wouldn't want to both grow that number and expand what they already have to other markets

First glance: seems about right; pretty popular/trendy site

Second glance: oh that's in Bs, not Ms; nevermind!

In comparison Disney is valuated at $128B.

that is a mind blowing comparison. Thanks for highlighting

Maybe something worth mentioning: The ratings on google play [1] dropped from 4.5/5 to 1.2/5 because they deleted a video criticizing a TikTok user and did not delete a video endorsing acid attacks, but it seems like it's mainly ongoing in India. [2]

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zhiliaoapp...

[2] https://www.indiatvnews.com/technology/news-tiktok-gets-1-st...

https://outline.com/YZZ9rB

>The trading of ByteDance is reflective of the global wave of consumers who agree that ByteDance can displace Facebook as the leading social network

If this came true, what would be the ramifications for US national security?

Facebook security issues were an influencing factor in the past elections. How much worse can it get?

I don’t think that rooting for Facebook against a Chinese built competitor is rooting for national security.

Neither are ideal, but at least we can compel the CEO of Facebook to testify before Congress. Good luck trying that with a Chinese national.

This is the parent ByteDance, not TikTok...

Anyone care to comment on the sustainability of these platforms?

Facebook has a strong network grounding effect (a few of them) and it may be around for a while.

But these 'hyper short form' things like Snapchat and TikTok I feel to be faddish. The 'form' is here to stay, but unless the platforms have lock-in they are fickle.

I think Apple, FB, MS, Google have strong incumbency, even though Snapchat is growing ... I'm not so sure.

That said - the world is still coming online in droves, and Snapchat only has 200M users meaning a lot of upside, and possibly an opportunity to entrench themselves.

I'm not sure that I would put Snapchat and TikTok in the same bucket. Snapchat has very strong network effects among a certain significant demographic. It has a feature that suggests people you may know and a variety of techniques (Streaks, BFFs, Snap Score) intended to keep people using it daily. Think of Snapchat more like a messaging app than like a social network.

Here today, gone tomorrow. Like AOL, Myspace and Compuserve before them.

TikTok doesn't have anything other than a fleeting fascination with today's youth. As they age, the next generation will find something else.

Does TikTok even have assets? real estate, manufacturing capabilities, intellectual property ... oh and paying customers?

If you believe in the power of targeted marketing, believe in TikTok. I didn't log in, I gave this app no information about me at all and it managed to turn 1 or 2 likes into a stream of endless content that hit a certain spot for me. I had to delete it.

Same reason honey was sold for 4 billion, they have an absolute ton of data on their users.

Social media in the US was always something I thought that Chinese companies couldn't penetrate due to cultural differences. The fact that they have means so many more US tech businesses are potentially at risk, because China's tech sector is extremely strong on the software side, even on the open source side (Ant design for react, Vue js). This is despite relatively high anti-China sentiments: see Koa-router being transferred to a Chinese maintainer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19158218, granted there are concerns with transferring a popular package to an unknown person for money, or Huawei's problems penetrating US market. Companies often have to hide their Chinese origins, such as OnePlus (a subsidiary of Oppo).

Maybe this isn't a substantive comment, but I think China understands America more than the other way around.

Compare the number of Chinese students in the US and the number of US students in China.

Thanks to Hollywood, American TV shows, and the Internet being predominantly US/English dominated, every country understands America more than the other way round.

There's also the massive Chinese diaspora.

That is probably true with America when compared with any other country. When I was in elementary school some kids thought Canada was just another state!

Feels like Twitter buying Vine and not executing made this possible?

Yeah, killing vine was such a huge mistake.

they really should just start it up again. i'm sure there's many who would love to get off the chinese service

I am happy for these news. Facebook has a monopoly on social media, and it’s good for competitors to grow strong enough to challenge it.

In theory that sounds nice but as far as trusting a company with my privacy/data, a Chinese backed social network is probably one of the only entities I would trust less than Facebook.

Why the clickbait title instead of the original ("TikTok Owner’s Value Exceeds $100 Billion in Private Markets")?

Two words: market depth.

It's just like bitcoin. In an illiquid market you can easily trade small volumes at ridiculous valuations.

https://archive.md/0eXcB

There is an insane amount of push to make TikTok happen. I am relatively certain that it will go nowhere.

Being successful in the TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram market segment seems completely random. These apps have so many features in common with each other and none of them really do anything innovative. TikTok is definitely not the only vine clone in the world, but for some reason this is the one that is worth $110b

Makes sense. The fed's inflated the money supply quite a lot.

For reference: 15 years ago, M1 was less than 1 trillion dollars. Today it’s over 5.

Twitter and Snapchat are both “only” worth around $25B each

This isn’t just about a money printer.

Tiktok: 800 million monthly active users worldwide.

Twitter: 330 million monthly active users worldwide.

Snapchat: 360 million monthly active users worldwide.

Maybe TikTok should "only" be worth $50B?

Are Twitter and Snapchat allowed behind the Great Firewall?

Honest question, I don't know

According to http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/ (not sure how legit it is), twitter.com is blocked and snapchat.com is allowed.

So far in this discussion I've figures of 500 million, 800 million and 1.5 billion users for Tiktok. All staggering but rather large degree of variance

I wonder how many of these traders are Chinese nationals- makes me wonder if we're towards a future where it's not just American dollars, but also RMB, Gulf Arab petrodollars (as we're seeing from the Saudi investment in the Softbank Vision Fund), and just dumb cash coming in from every part of the world economy. Or maybe we're already there.

Good news. Finally some social network without FB and Google!

OK, it is not really a social network right now, but I suggest they will move in that direction.

Are these guys also funded by Mayoshi Son and Softbank.

Paywall. Impossible to read it

http://archive.is/0eXcB

after rating drop on google still expensive

Do any of these kind of apps ever make money? Or do they just get pumped and dumped?

Yes. Billions in profit

Pretty insane. It will be replaced by another app-du-juor in 4 years. Social apps follow a pretty predictable schedule where cohorts are strongly associated with high school and college demographics moving through phases of their lives.

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