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The fact that this app came out of China and not Silicon Valley, when it was halfway there with Vine before killing it, seriously makes me question the long-ter
by spamizbad 7y ago
The fact that this app came out of China and not Silicon Valley, when it was halfway there with Vine before killing it, seriously makes me question the long-term sustainability of social/media apps from SV in the future. The era that gave us Youtube and Facebook is likely coming to a close.
- momokoko 7y agoWhat I feel is more interesting, is that TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads. This is directly at odds with the SV playbook for social media apps which relies mostly on viral and network effects boosted by growth hacks built directly into the product.
- spamizbad 7y agoGood point. I never noticed that. Makes sense: lots of those baked-in "growth hacks" can sometimes be a double-edged sword and can be user hostile.
- hi5eyes 7y ago>TikTok did it with aggressive traditional Google and Facebook ads weird everyone my age (20s) and younger know of tiktok through twitter/youtube never new tiktok had ads on fb, weird for them to target boomers
- TeMPOraL 7y agoFB and boomers? Only makes me reinforce my belief that generation classifications are mostly bullshit.
- malvosenior 7y agoBoomers are the only people I see using FB. Maybe a few millennials who are trapped so deep in social media addiction that they use it to supplement the 23 hours a day they spend on Instagram.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoI'm smack there in the middle of what people call "millennials" and everyone I know my age +/- 5 is on Facebook. Some of them a bit more on Instagram nowadays.
- jorvi 7y agoI'd say it's a gradient. 40+: Pretty much only Facebook 30-40: mainly Facebook, slight uptick in Instagram use 20-30: mix of Facebook and Instagram, some Snapchat 12-20: mix of Instagram and Snapchat, some very slight Facebook use If you count WhatsApp as social media: universal with 90%+ penetration among all age groups
- JCharante 7y agoFacebook is still huge in College Source: am in college
- momokoko 7y agoWhat age would you guess a "Boomer" is? You might be surprised to realize they are mostly in their 70s. Fairly certain Facebook's user base is not almost exclusively 70+ year olds
- pastor_elm 7y agoVine was unprofitable and i'm sure outside of sleazy Chinese data stealing, TikTok is as well.
- spamizbad 7y agoBut so was facebook for quite a long time. Now it's a 500B+ company. I remember when people said Google was crazy for paying $1B for Youtube - now it looks like one of their smartest acquisitions besides DoubleClick.
- segmondy 7y agoI won't say so. SV is willing to kill anything that threatens it by acquisition. If TikTok was a US company, SV would have made a nice offer. VCs would have pressed and possibly faced the founders to sell talking about how there's no more room for new players in the social network space. They will point to Snap & Google+ as an example. Then point how instagram was snap for taking the $1Billion. Google, Facebook, Apple all have enough data to see how fast an app is growing and buy/kill it before it becomes too popular. I think we can still see innovation out of SV, but it will take someone with restraint, and who's not willing to sell out for cash. For a first time founder that's very hard.
- NotSammyHagar 7y agoYou are crazily generalizing off of one event. Sure, this could have been a sv company product. Let's see 10 more things that sv fails with and chinese companies succeed in, then I'll believe it.