Comment by maxglute
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.
>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...>