Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Christopher Pickslay's avatar

This post makes some interesting points around advertising and competition, but it makes some huge assumptions and logical leaps. Just because ByteDance could and did spend $1B on app install ads doesn't necessarily mean they had to. They might have spent because they didn't want to wait for organic growth for any number of reasons. You also provide no evidence that "advertising is the only way to grow an app to viability" except the TikTok example.

TikTok is completely designed around virality. It may or may not have grown to its current size (or close to it) without all those ads. And the fact that they did stop spending on Facebook before (as you suggest) they ran out of users they could acquire, suggests that maybe they did have other growth options.

Expand full comment
krangle's avatar

I am against Facebook's purchase of Instagram and against the Chinese Apps.

The correct position is to be against both.

we need to block tiktok in america.

why are we allowing china's social/content network in america when they wont allow any of ours in china?

why are we allowing them to get network effects in our country?

it makes no sense

I am a democrat.

Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Youtube, Snapchat, Twitter... are all banned in China.

I cant for the life of me see why we would allow any of China's apps here.

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts