Comment by TMWNN
4 days ago
>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.