Snapchat Claims Advantage from Uncertainty Over TikTok's Future

Snapchat Claims Advantage from Uncertainty Over TikTok’s Future

Social media platform Snapchat, owned by Snap Inc., has declared that it is benefiting from the uncertainty surrounding the future of ByteDance-owned TikTok.

This was made known on Tuesday by Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, who disclosed during Snap’s fourth-quarter earnings call that the company was however not drawing too many conclusions regarding the increase of engagement on its platform due to the uncertainty surrounding TikTok.

“We’re not trying to draw too many conclusions from some of the engagement lift we saw when [TikTok] went dark for that brief period of time. I would say that the overall environment of uncertainty is benefiting our business,” Spiegel said.

He also highlighted the significant growth of Snapchat’s public content, which actually reached a billion public posts a month in the fourth quarter of last year.

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“I think in Q4 we actually reached a billion public posts a month on Snapchat. So the public content ecosystem is growing in a really nice and healthy way, and so we’re just going to continue our focus there when it comes to our strategy and participation.” Speigel added.

In a related development, President Donald Trump issued an executive order creating a U.S. sovereign wealth fund that may be utilized to buy TikTok.

Potential revenue sources include tariffs and other methods, and the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments anticipate creating the fund within a year.

Trump has already discussed buying TikTok with a number of parties, including Microsoft, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, and Larry Ellison, the chairman of Oracle.