Comment by nozzlegear 4 days ago
> because TikTok is still massively profitable without US
Do we know that? In almost all cases for mobile apps, the US is far and away the largest and most profitable market for any business. I'd also be surprised if the TikTok shop for example is profitable (or available?) outside the US.
>I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change
A social media site is not like a company that makes widgets. The latter's profits scale linearly with the number of widgets sold. A website's costs do not scale linearly (at least, not in the same way) with the number of users; much of the infrastructure cost is the same whether 500 million or one billion users are on the site.
It's entirely possible that, as nozzlegear said, a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that, the last time I checked, US users are a) only 10% of the total TikTok userbase and b) US creators are 21 of the top 50 TikTok users with the most followers. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-followed_TikTok_a...>
Without US specific data warehousing requirements (~1.5B Project Texas / Oracle), TikTok can fallback to using Douyin infra... which is already scaled for billion+ users. All that might goto PRC datacentres, i.e. Huawei Cloud which exist in most continents. If anything Douyin can eliminate redundant TikTok infra costs. I've no doubt Americans is a disproportionately more profitable in terms of ARPU, it would be a huge hit, but TikTok unlikely to go in red given those factors if RoW markets still leaves ~10B, especially if PRC wants to prioritize using TikTok as portal for ecommerce with PRC exports, which as I mentioned, TikTok is not nearly aggressive with monetizing as Douyin. I can't say it's impossible, but IMO unlikely.
I think something like 8/18B revenue (mostly ads) this year is from US. So it's subtantial, but 10B is not chomp change, and theoretically TikTok has growth potential since TikTok algo is competitive with western platforms, which cannot be said for US steel vs other modern metallurgy facilities. Compared to douyin in PRC, TikTok hasn't even began monetizing / ecommerce, which TBH would probably kill its popularity.