With that in mind, how are investors seriously willing to get behind this company in such a big way?
I highly doubt it's operating hosts are eating into the revenue that much so I'd say they're highly undervalued.
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.
"This isn't even my real hair color!"
You don't say. Holy hell, this is scary.
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.
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
"$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.
TikTok is probably the modern Instagram replacement, not the modern Facebook replacement.
Feel free to invest wherever you want, but personally I don't have the stomach for it.
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.
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.
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.
The only time I feel old is when other people tell me I'm old.
So current TikTok trends may be atypical.
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”?
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.
LiveJournal?
So at 26, you're getting old? :)
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.
This is horrifying when you consider this happens in every avenue of life and will only become better targeted as technology progresses.
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.
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.
X =
Email#
IRC#
ICQ
AIM
Yahoo Messenger
Friendster
MSN Messenger
MySpace
Flickr
Orkut
Google Talk
Skype
Google Wave
Youtube#
Twitter#
Vimeo#
G+
Periscope
Vine
Snapchat
TikTok
Zoom
# Only exceptions, so far
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.
> 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 getting into more ig live lately. It seems to be the latest popular thing. Live long videos of stars are hot.
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
And yet, SNAP stock is up YoY.
Source: I’m youth
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.
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
anyway the valuation clearly must include investor perception of their growth trajectory.