TikTok, a social media platform owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, has been aggressively poaching younger users from American social media companies such as Meta and Snapchat, and American tech titans are exploring its growth.
At this year’s Code Conference, which TikTok did not attend, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel praised TikTok’s investment strategy, but also blamed the same investment strategy for the challenges facing Google, Apple, Meta, and Snap. He vowed that Snap would compete with TikTok by continuing to focus on connecting with family and friends rather than strangers – a strategy he attributes to Snap’s success.
“The reason why this has been so challenging for companies to respond to in the United States, but also around the world, is the scale of TikTok’s investment. What nobody had anticipated in the United States was the level of investment that ByteDance made into the U.S. market, and of course in Europe, because it was just something that was unimaginable — no startup could afford to invest billions and billions and billions of dollars in user acquisition like that around the world,” said Spiegel of Snap.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai also mentioned TikTok as one of his company’s youngest and most important competitors, particularly for YouTube. He added that “competition in tech is hyper-intense,” and that some heat, like that from TikTok, seems to have come from nowhere.
The sources for this piece include an article in Forbes.