Twitter, TikTok Have Held Preliminary Talks About Possible Combination

Amazing

Maybe management don't want to admit to shareholders that they made a horrible mistake.

I didn’t write the comment but I don’t see the irony or validity of that comparison. Can you explain?

It's worth constantly re-iterating that Vine [1] was shutdown by Twitter in 2017 back when Twitter was losing a lot of cash. It was available for any tech company to purchase for pennies on the dollar and was losing $10 million/month to run [2].

Vine was very popular and a lot of people were very disappointed when it was shutdown. It predated TikTok and Musical.ly and certainly had the vast majority of users for short looping videos before it shutdown. Previously users have suggested Vine used a follow/subscribe-model and was not algorithmic like TikTok, but adding a news feed algorithm to keep up with a competitor would not have been that hard.

It's been reported Microsoft is looking at buying TikTok with some investors valuing the company at $30-$70 billion. [3] That number is high in the context of this latest WSJ article, which says Twitter has $7.8 billion in cash and a market cap of $29 billion.

However, TikTok reportedly earned $5.6 billion in revenue in Q1 2020 [4], and reportedly made a $3 billion net profit in 2019 [5]. It those numbers are correct then TikTok (which often called a Vine clone, and Vine 2.0) has grown bigger than Twitter itself.

This leapfrog happened in an era of cash-rich Silicon Valley software companies, where investment funding is easily obtainable.

It's worth reflecting deeply on this turn of events, and why Vine was allowed to wither and die, only for a better executed clone immediately take over and dominate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)

[2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/revive-vine

[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/microsoft-aims-for-a-deal-to-bu...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bytedance-results-idUSKBN...

[5] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/27/tiktok-bytedance-profit.html

That's cool - not just the idea but how simple the implementation is.