Comment by TMWNN
3 days ago
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.
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.