
TikTok hits 1.5B downloads, outperforming Instagram - elorant
https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-hits-15-billion-downloads-outperforming-instagram-2019-11
======
bransonf
What amazes me is that Tik-Tok fills the void created when Twitter killed
vine.

Given the popularity of Vine, and the outrage when Twitter killed it, I have
no idea why they thought it was a good move.

I’m bullish on Tik-Tok because I think it’s the next logical evolution of
social media (and totally captures the Vine fan base which was pretty big to
begin with)

First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram.
Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.

I think you would be amiss to not see TikTok as a potentially big player in
social media in the future.

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
> First there was text, both Facebook and Twitter. Then images with instagram.
> Now people want videos that they can consume in short bits of time en mass.

What you are describing is the continued fall to smaller and smaller bits of
stimulation and information. I’m worried about the consequences of this on the
human mind and humanity in general. Our tech is gradually eroding our ability
to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. I don’t want a future that
is some weird mix of Idiocracy and getting the Black Shakes from Johnny
Mnemonic. We need people that aren’t easily manipulated by ads and
disinformation campaigns and that can think long and clearly about something.

~~~
nbardy
At the same time we have the rise of long form podcasts. Producing quite the
opposite effect.

~~~
asdff
Podcasts that many people have playing constantly. In the car or on the train.
In the elevator. At work. In the bathroom. At the store. At home. For many
people, it's mindless banter they put on in the background while doing other
tasks. Youtube, but you can use your eyes.

But when do you get a free thought that's entirely your own? Just a moment
when someone or something isn't barking at you to listen to this or buy that.
I at least can't think clearly about something else if someone is reciting a
story to me. Scary when most podcasts also have advertising, so you are
getting a subconscious dose of that during all your waking hours.

~~~
filoleg
This reminds me of that "alarming" picture[0] taken on a Philadelphia train
used to scaremonger people about how everyone is addicted to the newspapers
and how it degrades the fabric of society and thought by making everyone
antisocial.[1]

Yes, there are many arguments that can be brought up about differences between
newspapers and social media, etc., but I strongly feel like it is essentially
the same kind of neo-ludditism that will play out the exact same way.
Something new will come up after social media, and then people will jump on
that as the next thing that "degrades the society". We can already see a
micro-version of that, with people lamenting how "back in the old days, blog
posts were long form and meaningful, not like those tweets and instagram
posts".

0\. [https://imgur.com/gallery/WkHHpZ1](https://imgur.com/gallery/WkHHpZ1)

1\. [https://xkcd.com/1227/](https://xkcd.com/1227/)

~~~
dmix
Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night stand
culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider
society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and
are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

People are always looking for the 'surprising' reasons why society is really
in decay and everyone's living their day-to-day lives completely blind to it -
except us few who know better.

There's huge demand for this sort of thing to be true, it's been the basis of
every cult ever, plenty of extreme political movements, religions, and a
million think pieces through history. Yet life and culture always ends up
being far more boring and resilient than predicted.

~~~
filoleg
>Just like all of the people pushing FUD that Tinder/Grindr and one night
stand culture would kill true relationships (or worse implications on wider
society). Even though everyone I know who used those earlier in their life and
are now in serious relationships with people, often one's they met online.

Oh wow, I haven't even thought of that one until you mentioned it, but it
certainly seems to ring true for the people I know as well.

------
parliament32
The metrics make sense: as a user of both platforms, I'm spending far more
time on TT these days than IG. My biggest gripe is Instagram is absolutely
filled with ads: you get ads in between stories, ads in between posts, then a
good portion of actual posts are "sponsored" (so ads from the posters
themselves)... it's just a really bad mire of advertising and people trying to
sell me stuff. Meanwhile TikTok is still fairly ad-free (I get an ad while
scrolling maybe once every 10 mins?) and the content is just better.

In terms of content: remember when Instagram first became popular, and you
started using that more compared to Facebook, because FB just felt "stale" and
old while IG was the new and exciting thing, with better and more exciting
content? That's basically the different between TT and IG now.

~~~
timwaagh
TikTok is the first social medium I don't get. It isn't very good at figuring
out my tastes and just serves me generic hot people content. It doesn't try to
figure out who I might want to contact with either. Maybe I'm getting old or
something.

~~~
brailsafe
You don't like hot people?

~~~
timwaagh
They tend to burn my tongue. I prefer them served lukewarm.

------
onlyrealcuzzo
From a fraud perspective, it would be extremely cheap to fake downloads.

Since Chinese companies aren't audited the same way US companies are, yet they
can still list on exchanges, having some outside "probable" growth metric
gives more credibility to their internal numbers.

I'm not saying it's all fake. I'm just saying it wouldn't take very much
resources to fake this, and ByteDance has the resources, and we don't really
audit them, so I'd gladly miss out on this growth opportunity, but that's just
me.

~~~
trophycase
It's probably not fake. My teenage sister has gone from "TikTok is so cringey"
a few months ago to "I actually kind of like it". It's now socially acceptable
to use so it's in the clear. I saw someone using it on the airplane last week
too.

~~~
chrshawkes
I have children, all the children are using it. The other day two famous
TikTokers we're spotted in a Northern VA mall and it was a pretty big deal.
It's not fake.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Just because a lot of kids are using it doesn't mean it has 1.2Bn downloads.
That's a lot of downloads.

Gmail is 10 years old, for context, and it's ubiquitous for basically the
entire population, and it has barely 4 times that. When you account for the
fact that most Gmail users have gone through several phones and downloaded
Gmail several times, it seems pretty suspicious that an app only for kids has
1.2Bn downloads -- when it's possible close to the entire Android mobile users
that use Gmail -- which comes pre-installed on like ~60% of phones in the
world.

I'm pretty sure these numbers do not include the Chinese market at all, since
they don't have Google Play Services. A lot of Tiktok's users are supposed to
be in China.

If these numbers are supposed to include Chinese users, I'd take that with a
double grain of salt. For the same auditing reasons, we have no reason to
trust any download counts that come from a Chinese company.

If these are supposed to be only iPhone numbers (which AFAIK include Chinese
downloads), that's SUBSTANTIALLY more suspicious. There definitely aren't
~750Mn kids with iPhones. And the numbers that would imply in total are
completely unbelievable.

At a previous company, we did a marketing campaign with TikTok. They claimed
that more than 65% of their users are under 25.

~~~
JCharante
So there's 抖音 and TikTok. They have completely seperate databases and
installers (unlike WeChat). On IOS, if you are geolocated (or maybe it's
locale restricted?) in the Chinese market then you can only download 抖音。If you
are located in the international regions, then you will only find TikTok.

Since there is no Google Play Store in China, you will only find TikTok there
[in the Play Store]. To install 抖音 you simply download the apk from their
website and side-load it.

Since the article states

> TikTok has hit 1.5 billion total downloads across the App Store and Google
> Play

I believe that IOS has around 13% market share in China. So this is missing
out on A LOT of downloads.

Then again it's hard to believe that there are 1.5 billion downloads for
tiktok (ios + android) and 抖音(just ios). Then that must mean that it's not
counting 抖音 downloads on Android.

------
Jedi72
Im surprised at peoples comments like "its not organic growth" and "they'll
never be profitable" \- how is TikTok different to snap/insta/fb in the early
years? The thing that matters in that biz is hitting critical mass of users.
Then they can spend the next 10 yrs bleeding their users in long tail of
platform stickyness.

~~~
butler14
huge advertising spends

~~~
baq
Chinese money wants in instead of the usual way where it’s western money
trying to pick China. Not sure about censorship, always a possibility when
Chinese money is involved.

------
jzelinskie
I recently was watching a stream where the topic was playing bootleg versions
of games on an Android tablet. Instead of microtransactions, many of the games
would forcefully stop the game and prompt the user to install TikTok in a way
that looked impossible to avoid. This definitely seems to imply that TikTok is
directly paying for installs and gives me doubt about their organic growth.

------
rvz
> TikTok poses a major threat to Facebook and Instagram in particular.

Billions of downloads doesn't tell you if 'something is growing' it's the
Daily Active Users. Ask them how TikTok plans to make money in order to remain
profitable and they will completely fall tone deaf.

This article tells you nothing about TikTok outperforming instagram.

~~~
enahs-sf
While I agree that downloads in and of themselves aren’t super telling, if we
think about the conversion rate to user this is still an insane amount of
people. At 20% conversion, that’s 300M users. Even 1% DAU from that would be
3M people and probably from a segment of people that are the most valued (ages
14-25) to instagram from an audience perspective.

Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.

~~~
aylmao
> Now what the retention looks like, that’s another story.

That's what's got me skeptical. There's a lot of people saying TikTok proves
Twitter killing Vine was a bad move, but Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp are
wildly different "social networks". IMO the equivalent of putting Amazon,
Youtube and Wikipedia on the same "website" category.

WhatsApp is incredibly useful. It's perhaps the "lamest" of all social
networks— it doesn't have "creators", it's not known for its cool filters, it
has no "likes", but it works and where it's used, it's as ubiquitous and used
as phone numbers once were.

Facebook is very utilitarian too. IMO they haven't become "uncool" because
they dropped the ball— they went for the general population. It's like they
purposefully toned down their "cool" brand to widen the age of users that
could associate with it. Now you can not only find pretty much anyone on
Facebook, but also buy and sell on Marketplace, find a Job, find events,
restaurants, find groups for parents, study groups, groups for people with
rare diseases, the list goes on.

TikTok is very popular, but what's the demographic and what's the value
proposition here? Teenage entertainment? If so, they're competing with
Instagram, but also YouTube and Netflix. It's also perfectly plausible its
users will outgrow it by the time they go to college or enter the workforce,
or once the ads pick up to keep with the operational expenses.

The real challenge for the company will come in the form or retention and the
broadening of their product + user base to compete on the next level, as
something useful and not just entertaining, IMO.

------
keepper
Facebook’s privacy faux pas will be nothing compared to a company who’s
government can request any of users data (Chinese or not) with zero oversight.

We are in for a wild ride as major Chinese companies start building successful
global companies.

~~~
darzu
Except who will know?

------
m12k
"It is the third most-downloaded app outside of gaming this year. Numbers one
and two are WhatsApp and Messenger, while four and five are the Facebook app
and Instagram."

Facebook owns 4/5 of the most downloaded apps - just let that sink in for a
minute. This space needs competition pretty badly.

~~~
wil421
There was competition and FB used their war chest to buy them all, sans
messenger. They forced people to download messenger to see FB messages on
mobile. They also lied and said you had a message when you really didn’t. Just
to force the messenger download.

~~~
mhluongo
Didn't they acquire Messenger as well? I think it was called Beluga

~~~
dehrmann
No, it was split out from the main app:
[https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-
spl...](https://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/11629664/facebook-messenger-split)

> The move allows Facebook developers to focus more exclusively on features
> and improvements for each individual app. Of course, it also requires users
> to download another Facebook property onto their smartphones, a not-so-
> subtle way for the company to increase app downloads.

I found this on Beluga, but it smells of an acquihire and rewrite, and
predates the split by a few years: [https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-
facebook-messenger/](https://www.adweek.com/digital/beluga-facebook-
messenger/)

~~~
mhluongo
The article you posted is about how Beluga was turned into Messenger...

------
quotemstr
Tech in the west has been complacent for years, and it's not just leadership
either. People whine constantly about "work life balance" and spend all day
demanding that employers ban everything that offends them. The Chinese,
meanwhile, are killing it. Only in the west do we indulge bizarre and self
serving ideas like "you do more when you work less" and "what people
contribute is less important than the way they make others feel".

Turns out that these beliefs don't actually work. They're self indulgent
nonsense. We could afford them for a while, but now that we have actual
competition, we can't. We need to go back to old school attitudes, buckle
down, get our heads out of our asses, and compete.

------
Nextgrid
I'm glad to see Facebook's turf being taken over, however this invader is no
better than whoever got dethroned.

I'm not even talking about China, but just the fact that their business model
is also based on being creepy, stalking their users and then serving them
cancer aka ads.

I hope one day we'll have a mainstream social media platform that doesn't rely
on stalking to fund itself, or at least allows to pay to opt-out.

------
dxl32
Here's my writeup on why TikTok is doing so well:
[https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-
tiktok](https://www.danielxli.com/posts/why-im-obsessed-with-tiktok)

~~~
Nagyman
I enjoyed this, thanks!

I think they also nailed the music aspect of content creation. Whereas other
platforms are actively hostile to users using unlicensed audio, TT licenses
popular music which saves a boatload of effort on the content creation side
and just makes it all more compelling to watch. Contrast that with takedown
notices and little support for including sound at all.

------
Smithalicious
Like clockwork you can't mention anything vaguely related to China without
someone accusing everyone else of being a pro-China shill. This is a fucking
social network. We don't bring up Guantanamo Bay and the NSA scandals whenever
Twitter does anything.

------
durpleDrank
Astroturfed or not TikTok has excellent creators (for now anyway I'm sure it
will be ruined as it becomes more popular if history teaches us anything about
fads). Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the
best parts of it without downloading the app. It's easy to burn 1-2 hours
mindlessly watching absurd videos.

I really shouldn't be saying this because I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but
if someone at FB HQ is racking their brain for a solution to destroy TikTok it
is very very easy. Do what you did to destroy your own product. Create an
influx of lame people to produce content for it. When the "For You" page of
TikTok is just un-ironic minion memes and Karen levels of "Live, Love, Laugh"
people won't use it much longer.

~~~
progval
> Just go watch a TikTok compilation on YouTube if you want to get the best
> parts of it without downloading the app.

There's also
[https://www.tiktok.com/trending](https://www.tiktok.com/trending)

------
partiallypro
My only concern with TikTok is data collection being funneled to the CCP.

~~~
progval
Unlike Facebook, which is data collection being funneled to Western companies
and US agencies.

~~~
partiallypro
The US isn't using that data to put Muslims into concentration camps and
killing them to take their organs, or marching troops into Hong Kong.

~~~
throw964563
I wouldn’t be so sure,

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate,
> “We kill people based on metadata.”

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be
> triggered, without even knowing the target’s name, if too many derogatory
> checks appear on their profile. “Armed military aged males” exhibiting
> suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone
> “seen to be giving out orders.” Such mathematics-based assassinations have
> come to be known as “signature strikes.”

[https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
features/how-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-
to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/)

------
BoumTAC
Can you find interesting video(non funny) on tik tok ?

For example if your interested in bike, can you find cool bike related stuff ?
Or is it just some people doing funny thing with some music on it ?

I tried it a few months ago and found only funny videos.

It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.

I like Instagram or YouTube because I can follow thing I'm interesting in.

~~~
afiori
My impression is that it is a quick, simple, but extremely effective medium
for artistic expression.

In a sense it is very pure; it is not about anything specific and, more
importantly, it is not about showing a fake, happy, successful version of
yourself.

While I am too old to participate in it, as a medium it looks more healthy in
term of living with your online persona (compared to insta-models and travel
vlogging).

> It's cool but it's not what's going to create a account on it.

The reason to create an account would be not to watch videos but to make
videos. In that tiktok feels a bit like a teenager version of a twitter,
youtube chimera.

~~~
dna_polymerase
> [..] as a medium it looks more healthy in term of living with your online
> persona (compared to insta-models and travel vlogging).

I think that is the core to its success (and was for Vine). Instagram became a
platform for people to promote themselves or some product and people are fully
aware of that nowadays.

~~~
jzymbaluk
In my own, very subjective, experience. It seems more people are "real" on Tik
Tok. I just opened up the app, and the second video I saw, was a young woman
talking about her Alopecia (an auto-immune disease that causes hair loss).
I've seen similar videos about Scoliosis and Autism and lots of other issues
people face. There are also a lot of queer creators on Tik Tok (though the
company has had ongoing issues with removing queer content).

Tik Tok isn't free from toxic behavior or those problems with insta-models and
travel vloggers by any means, but my impression has been that it's a
surprisingly friendly and welcoming community, especially compared to a lot of
other social networks

------
ksec
Outperforming when Instagram is banned in China.

I remember there was a vaguely similar services from Twitter, and that somehow
never caught on.

~~~
Nextgrid
Doesn't TikTok use a separate brand and app called Douyin in China with its
own app download counts?

~~~
ksec
Yes, but it was in the report and I quote

"Much of TikTok's growth has been driven by an explosion of users in India,
who accounted for 31% of the app's downloads. Its second-biggest market was
China which made up 11.5% of downloads, then the US with 8.2%. "

------
xivzgrev
One cannot simply compare total number of downloads (Tiktok) to number of
monthly active users (Instagram) to make assertion that Tiktok may be as big
as Instagram.

------
dehrmann
TikTok's grown so fast I have to wonder if it's a fad. It's built around a
pretty specific interaction. When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music
clips, what's going to keep them there? Will they be able to pivot to
something more engaging, or will that just look too much like Facebook or
Instagram?

~~~
JCharante
> When people get bored of dancing to 15 sec music clips, what's going to keep
> them there?

Is that what TikTok is? I only use 抖音 which is definetely not that (there are
a lot of dog videos, Bart Baker singing patriotic songs, Bart Baker staging
skits where he makes americans love Chinese snacks, Alan Walker's team posts
pretty frequently, and like 2-minute episodes of original dramas). Some video
game highlights and like some really shallow plots where A treats a service
worker badly, and then they show A's significant other be disgusted by the
behavior and give the service worker a giant tip or something.

------
themagician
Funny to read these comments and see how many people are now “old” but haven’t
realized it yet.

------
bxparks
TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and China is a totalitarian state, so
it's basically owned by the Chinese government. Is it too paranoid to worry
about all the videos and their metadata being controlled by the Chinese
government?

------
thiagomgd
I tried it a month ago, and while it was fun, I had to uninstall because
there's NO WAY to disable push notifications for new posts, profile
suggestions, etc...

~~~
snazz
You can’t just disable notifications for the app from your phone settings?

------
tinyhouse
My daughter and her friends are using Tiktok and Snapchat. It seems these two
are mostly popular for teenagers. That was also the user base of Instagram in
the first years. To be honest I'm trying to get her off both of these services
and instead rely on texting/hangouts/email/etc to communicate with her
friends.

------
devsatish
another observation: TikTok and similar apps (and the long Phone designs) have
made Portrait/Vertical Video ther norm.

------
PikachuEXE
We need another product that's not controlled by CCP though. Privacy &
security should be the most important topics nowadays. We should all beware
how big tech companies, especially those linked with CCP, would be using the
data they collected. And take action (quit/avoid) when / before it hurts.

------
devy
The biggest headline should be this:

    
    
        Essentially, TikTok is the only app in the top five that isn't owned by Facebook.
    

Do you trust Facebook to influence your children with toxic content and
propaganda in the top 5 app downloads all owned by Facebook? I don't.

~~~
sjilo
Do you trust the Chinese government?

------
theredbox
The only country able to stand up to China is the US. Without the US not
trying enough we are all doomed...

I dont want my country to become once again a russian satellite. China is too
far away but will feed Russia to influence my part of the world.

Seriously muricans get your shit together.

------
rcpt
Expect to see more of this. Other nations will innovate and keep talent around
while Bay Area engineers are stuck in traffic or moving away because of bad
schools and insane housing costs.

------
Pmop
Any form of social network platform gets ruined for me once it becomes
mainstream. The feeling of belonging to a community is gone. Interacting with
renowned people is almost impossible.

------
vagab0nd
I'm not sure what to feel about this. The app seems worth than facebook to me.
I've not used it myself, but from the limited information I gathered from
friends, some of them would mindlessly watch it for hours and not be able to
stop even if they wanted to. Some forced themselves to delete the app.

Genuine question to people who use the app: how does it add value? Or is it a
even better attention grabber?

------
ponsin
I'm surprised that it is so popular but lacks a web interface. I heard a lot
about it so I wanted to try it. But I didn't want to try enough to download an
app so I have yet to see what do the hype is about. Maybe if the web interface
was good enough I would have downloaded the app

------
Xunxi
Sad to see this devolve into politics and hardly anything about the underlying
technology, strategic execution, monetization prospects and the like.

------
miguelmota
That's a ton of downloads, and an abundant source of data from international
users going directly to the hands of the Chinese government.

------
hackernewsboy
any thing big in china has some liaison with ccp regime, otherwise it cannot
survive.

------
hackernewsboy
this one app just gets hot for less than two years, a lot of promotion and
marketing power behind it.

------
taquitobandito
Going exactly to China’s plan

------
graphememes
Downloads != usage

------
komali2
Aight, conspiracy theory time.

I'm becoming concerned about PRC influence in my country (USA). From my
perspective the PRC (government) is blatantly evil, and happily engaging in
cultural warfare, and nobody seems to be fighting back.

I see absurd astroturfing and shilling on social media here (Reddit, Twitter,
Facebook). It's always obvious - whereas a genuine criticizer of the Hong Kong
protestors might ask about violence, the shills will always use the word
"ISIS" somewhere in their message.

It's everywhere and we don't seem to be fighting back. I browse Chinese social
media and while my Mandarin isn't great I'm not seeing any level of
AstroTurfing at all. So am I just a crazy conspiracy person? Is the PRC
astroturfing not a big deal? Maybe my concerns are valid but that doesn't
justify further concern about the influx of PRC messaging vectors to the USA,
i.e. tiktok?

When I worked in the PRC I got to see first hand the strong-arm of the Party.
Every business involved in communication had a government official whose
entire job was to ensure the company "protected the social wellbeing of the
people of the PRC" or similar. I can only assume tiktok has the same and I can
only assume it's a matter of time before the Party starts directing the
company to leverage their access to a massive US audience in a way that
benefits the "social wellbeing," i.e. by disseminating PRC propaganda.

~~~
pcroh
Exactly the way I feel about American influence in Europe. It's not too bad,
you'll get used to it.

~~~
whatshisface
What are the issues that America is trying to push in Europe?

~~~
mgbmtl
As a Canadian, random examples: Indifference to violence, hypocrisy on nudity,
monetizing privacy (no respect for privacy), monetizing medical care.

(I don't mean to start a flame war, but they are topics where EU and Canada
tend to disagree with major US trends)

~~~
hervature
As a fellow Canadian can you expand on this?

Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime
(born in 1993). Don't know what you mean on hypocrisy on nudity, but I only
became comfortable with it when I visited Scandinavia when I was 22; seems
like Canada has a similar issue.

I'll maybe give you medical care, but this is an incredibly complex topic. To
think that public health care isn't monetized is a naïve point of view.

Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently than
the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US. That's my
honest opinion.

~~~
rchaud
> Canada has been involved in every war that the US has been in my lifetime
> (born in 1993).

Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

> Somehow, the only thing that the Canadian government has done differently
> than the US is that it has convinced its people that it is not the US.

Canada did not suffer a financial crisis to the extent that the US did in 2008
because banks here are regulated very differently than in the US. Also, the
likelihood of medical bills causing financial ruin is much lower here.

~~~
hervature
> Canada was not party to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That's what is reported. I highly suspect JTF2 was involved since the
beginning. This directly proving my point of the government misleading the
people.

[0] - [https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-
da...](https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/02/war-crimes-in-the-dark-canadas-
special-forces/)

------
senectus1
pfft. its carefully targeted to children and the young. it's even more
ephemeral than twitter. there is no "community" behind it.. its purely
entertainment.

It'll die off. it has nothing to build on.

------
nriconalla
Wow that is really a great competition but I guess TikTok really doing great
because there are lot of funny and good content or videos uploaded.

~~~
Fjolsvith
And I find some of the ads on TikTok are relevant and interesting to me.
Additionally, I don't have to wait 7 seconds to skip an ad I don't want to
see, nor do I have to watch several ads in a row to continue to the next video
(think Youtube).

~~~
sorenn111
What's the operating margin? Of course a new company will have like 0 ads as
it tries to capture market share and be cool. Once VC moneys runs out and they
need to make money, believe me, you'll see ads.

~~~
logicchains
The parent company is profitable now ([https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-
owner-bytedances-firs...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/30/tiktok-owner-
bytedances-first-half-revenue-better-than-expected-at-over-7-billion-
sources.html)).

~~~
sanxiyn
Note that their revenue generator is Toutiao, not TikTok.

