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Social-Media App Musical.ly Is Acquired for as Much as $1B

wsj.com

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Re: Social-Media App Musical.ly Is Acquired for as Much as $1B

#5

Post by adventured »

giacaglia wrote: post #4

Toutiao is a behemoth in the media space. Will see when it invades the US

It certainly grew fast, no question. It's not a behemoth however. It has 1/5th the sales of CBS, which is just one of dozens of big US media companies.

It's very unlikely they'll be able to invade the US in a meaningful sense. Toutiao's primary business is media content aggregation. They're going to be incapable of presenting non-censored news, content, media. The CPC will require that anything they allow in their publishing space globally, be controlled and censored strictly to present the views of the CPC. What China allows their domestic companies to do internationally when it comes to media, is not very different from what they allow domestically. That's why companies like Baidu and Tencent, which are drastically larger than Toutiao, have been entirely unable to crack the Western media markets. The restrictions Chinese companies face due to the strict authoritarian regime at home, is extremely different from what companies in eg Japan faced when they 'invaded' the US 30 years ago (such as Sony in music & movies).

It's why there will never be a Chinese Reddit conceptually. Free expression is illegal for all Chinese media companies, it leaves them at an extreme disadvantage when competing globally.

Re: Social-Media App Musical.ly Is Acquired for as Much as $1B

#8

Post by Ravikiran »

adventured wrote: post #5
giacaglia wrote: post #4

Toutiao is a behemoth in the media space. Will see when it invades the US

It certainly grew fast, no question. It's not a behemoth however. It has 1/5th the sales of CBS, which is just one of dozens of big US media companies. It's very unlikely they'll be able to invade the US in a meaningful sense. Toutiao's primary business is media content aggregation. They're going to be incapable of presenting non-censored news, content, media. The CPC will require that anything they allow in their pu…

But it would be interesting to see how they use musical.ly. Toutiao has AI capabilities and I think they want to make use of the lip-syncing ability.

Re: Social-Media App Musical.ly Is Acquired for as Much as $1B

#10

Post by rki9191 »

adventured wrote: post #5
giacaglia wrote: post #4

Toutiao is a behemoth in the media space. Will see when it invades the US

It certainly grew fast, no question. It's not a behemoth however. It has 1/5th the sales of CBS, which is just one of dozens of big US media companies. It's very unlikely they'll be able to invade the US in a meaningful sense. Toutiao's primary business is media content aggregation. They're going to be incapable of presenting non-censored news, content, media. The CPC will require that anything they allow in their pu…

True that.. they even tried to acquire reddit back in 2014 but the deal didn’t go through.
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