Comment by sudosysgen 4 days ago
This is an absolutely ridiculous line of reasoning. Tiktok has over a billion users, and about 150 million of those are American. It would be downright stupid to sell all of it just for the US market and it would set an absolutely disastrous precedent.
Tiktok is an offshoot of Douyin, I don't think Douyin needs the US to be profitable, and software has a low marginal cost.
> PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.
I never said so, I said I wouldn't be surprised if a significant number did. Having grown up in this environment I've seen people literally buy 4 year old iPhones just for iMessage. American teenagers are very weird about social media and this kind of behavior wouldn't be out of character.
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 a TikTok without US users is unprofitable. Especially given that 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...>
PS - That you seriously believe that tens of millions of iPhone-using Americans will buy, carry around, and constantly switch to an Android phone just to sideload TikTok boggles the mind.