Comment on ByteDance prefers TikTok shutdown in US if legal options fail, sources say
Sl00k@programming.dev 6 months agoThe article talks about why they’d prefer to shut down if you take their word it. Essentially the US is such a tiny portion of ByteDances it would be more optimal to shut down then to risk the sale of their algorithm, which is their primary revenue driver, as a whole. Assuming they’re using relatively similar algorithms on Douyin, and they don’t want this to turn around and be sold to their Chinese competition, which is where the real money is being made for ByteDance.
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 6 months ago
Bullshit. Average revenue per user is a pretty common industry benchmark, and the US absolutely slaughters the rest of the world. We’re the fat, dumb, brainwashed cows the advertisers can’t get enough of.
Is that really justified, or an example of selection bias?
Does it matter?
EssentialCoffee@midwest.social 6 months ago
Not really. It depends on what it is. There are entire games and items that aren’t available in the US, but make a killing in Asia.
Like, here’s Genshin Impact numbers from 2023.
On that game, the US comes in at 7th, is less than half of the top country (Japan) and is notably behind Switzerland.
For Tik Tok specifically, we can look at their annual reports.
Let’s look at average annual users per region. 682M in Asia Pacific, which does not include China. 192M in North America.
China’s numbers are 750M daily.
I don’t think most of their money comes from the US.
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 6 months ago
There’s a reason you couldn’t actually talk about the ARPU, and that’s because an American user is worth literally 7x more than a Chinese user on average. Which is why TikTok had a revenue of 16.1b in 2023, with a growing user base, and ByteDance’s total revenue was 40.8b.
HessiaNerd@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Maybe the CCP is paying the difference?