As TikTok faces the very real threat of a US ban, the true size of parent company ByteDance’s social media cash cow has emerged.
According to a Financial Times report quoting insiders, TikTok generated a record $16 billion in US sales in 2023, though this was just a fraction of the $120 billion in global revenues.
For comparison, Facebook and Instagram parent Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META, ETR:FB2A, SWX:FB) brought in $135 billion in the last financial year, with US and Canada revenues totalling around $53 billion.
Beijing-based ByteDance gets most of its revenues domestically, where the Chinese Communist Party strictly prohibits Meta’s social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Elon Musk-owned Twitter/X is also banned in the country, making Douyin (the Chinese iteration of TikTok) the defacto choice for Chinese youth.
The US House of Representatives this week approved a bill that would force its Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest from the app.
Failure to comply would lead to TikTok being banned from Google’s and Apple’s play stores, effectively eliminating US distribution of the app.
Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who co-authored the bill, said the US could not "take the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled or owned by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party".
Top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries also offered his support, saying it would reduce “the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited, and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary”.
ByteDance is one of the most valuable private companies in the world with an estimated valuation of $220 billion.