Participants hold signs in support of TikTok outside the US Capitol building on March 13, 2024 in Washington, DC.
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TikTok’s social media rivals are set to jump — but exactly who will win remains an open question.
Homegrown technology firms will now benefit greatly after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday refused to overturn a federal law that will have TikTok removed from app stores on Sunday over national security concerns.
Industry analysts such as EMarketer determined earlier this month that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, along with Alphabet, which owns YouTube, could capture about half of the ad dollars that could flee TikTok once the app to darken. (All annual US spending on social media advertising in 2024 was about $80 billion to $90 billion, according to EMarketer.)
Still, it’s not a done deal: Once inaugurated, President Trump could give TikTok a reprieve while it searches for a buyer, making good on his promise to “save” the app for a short time. If and when TikTok is completely banned, it will be difficult for any rival to fully capture the app’s user base.
“It’s not that these companies haven’t tried to attract TikTok users — there’s something about the way the service works that makes it hard to copy,” said Jim Lewis, senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Forbes.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the House Rayburn Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC.
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Federal law enforcement now bans US companies from doing business with TikTok starting Sunday. A ban would last until Chinese-owned ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, sells its US division to an American firm. So far, numerous buyers, ranging from Elon Musk to Mr.
The Biden administration has said it will not implement the law in the final hours of its mandate. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Friday that “law enforcement action should simply be left to the next administration, which takes office on Monday” at noon ET.
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, did not respond ForbesRepeat request for comment.
In a video TikTok released Friday, CEO Shou Zi Chew called the law “arbitrary censorship” and added his thanks to “President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States”.
“If you had a dollar, where would you see the best? If you invested it in Meta or Snap, all else being equal, the Snap dollar should be worth more.”
TikTok has captured the attention of millions of Americans in recent years. Pew Research found in December 2024 that roughly one-third of US adults use the app. Nineteen percent of American teenage girls say they use it “almost constantly.” Analysts have found that the average 18- to 24-year-old TikTok user spends nearly 80 minutes a day on the app.
The question is: where will they go?
“The hypothesis is that people will go somewhere else to scratch the same itch,” said Evan Horowitz, CEO of online ad agency Movers+Sakers, which has prepared its clients to translate their TikTok videos to other platforms. . “It’s not like the traffic will go to Twitter because it’s a different form. YouTube Shorts skews younger, while a millennial is more likely to prefer Instagram and Reels.
Benjamin Black, co-head of online equity research at Deutsche Bank, said Forbes that a rival is willing to see the most relative benefit: Snap.
Because Meta is a significantly larger company (about $1.55 trillion market cap) compared to Snap (about $20 billion market cap), even a small bump for the Santa Monica-based app would translate into a much greater relative income.
“Most people assume that Meta will take the lion’s share, but given Snap’s size, even if it takes 10% or more of TikTok’s minutes, and they monetize it with Snap’s traditional fees, that would have major consequences for business. in a positive way,” Black said.
“If you had a dollar, where would you see the best? If you invested it in Meta or Snap, all else being equal, the Snap dollar should be worth more.”
Snap has been preparing for TikTok to go offline for months. In September, the company announced Simple Snapchat, a redesigned app that will debut later this quarter that is clearly intended to mimic TikTok. Simple Snapchat would have what the company called a “first unified recommendation system,” which eliminates some Snap Map and Stories tabs, making it much closer to a TikTok-like design where short-form videos are loaded immediately.
Snapchat on the App Store displayed on a phone screen and a laptop keyboard are seen in this illustration photo taken in Krakow, Poland on August 10, 2022.
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Other ad firms are also looking at reallocating their spending to other types of social media apps, and not just those that mimic TikTok’s style and format.
“We’re also looking at platforms like Pinterest and Reddit that have a strong social search presence and search targeting functionality, enabling us to stay nimble in capturing conversations and requests in real time,” Toni Box, executive vice president of experience of the brand in the Assembly. Global, a media agency, was emailed Forbes.
Also in the mix are Chinese apps like Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, which has a similar short-form video format and saw an influx of so-called “TikTok refugees” this week as it shot to the top of app store downloads . . But if it grows fast enough, it could eventually face a similar ban.
“Unlike TikTok, RedNote does not have a separate app in the US, which poses similar, if not more serious, issues for lawmakers concerned about user privacy and national security,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at EMarketer, wrote in an email. . Forbes.
“What is clear is that the law does not solve the problems that lawmakers have said it intends to fix. Its narrow scope (ie singling out ByteDance and TikTok) does not address the larger privacy and security risks in social media posed by US-owned and foreign-owned apps.”
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