I can see TikTok calling their bluff and then Gen Z just using VPNs to get around it so now all the ad dollars flow exclusively to Chinese companies instead of American ones
TikTok has 150 million active monthly users in the United States.
I'm guessing that 1.7 billion number is prolly off due to bots and defunct accounts, but still, you don't sell your platform for 10% of your market lmao. I'm not sure if the US thought they would honestly back down just because they're America, if they wanted to ban it because they honestly think it's spying on Americans, or what exactly the play here was, but the obvious one (force them to sell to Americans) was laughably stupid and unlikely to happen for obvious reasons.
tbh that 10% of the market probably contributes about ~30-40% of the revenue
Western users typical contribute >10x more revenue than all other users for adtech platforms, and just ~20-30% of users will contribute to 90% of the revenue (my source is my employers' internal analytics dashboard)
Here is Google's (note that rest of world includes all other developed countries too like Canada, Europe, Oceania, East Asia)
This was in fact brought up by Republicans questioning the CEO of TikTok. They asked him why (or said it was unfair that) the Chinese version of TikTok shows stuff like science, math, and limit children's usage of the app but the American one shows only mind numbing content lol (some of which he defined as pro Hamas, anti American content)
He should've said, "content is created by the user, in line with government regulations; the greater the calibre of the user base and the government, the greater the calibre of the content".
Do we not really know revenue being generated that is directly attributable to Tik Tok?
It'd be unlikely that Tiktok shares this detailed of financials to us. I'd imagine that Google data above got leaked from a random employee, they have a ton of analytics open to all workers
I actually don't see this tbh. Unlike India and US, no other Western-aligned country has a domestic industry in this area to protect and the EU really loves to fine tech giants for free money, so TikTok is overall good for them
I don't think 'good for them' is the thing that matters here though. The EU is a massive market for Instagram and we've seen first hand in recent years where EU leadership's loyalties lie.
It's possible they won't follow the US lead but I wouldn't be too surprised if they do.