What is Tiktok’s stock price, and are they publicly traded? Investors cannot purchase shares of TikTok because it is a private company. Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ: META), aka Facebook, is a social media company that traders can invest in.
Owning TikTok stock has become a very exciting idea for investors. This popular app has become the number-one social media platform in the world in a very short time. Today, we dive deeply into TikTok and the Stock Market, discuss how to purchase TikTok stock, and discover who owns TikTok.
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Table of Contents
TikTok Stock Introduction (No Stock Symbol)
TikTok is the number one growing social media company, beating out Facebook and Snapchat. Is there a TikTok stock price? Also, word on the street is that big tech companies are chomping for a stake in the company’s success.
The 2020 pandemic caused TikTok to explode in users. Everyone was home, so social media became a bigger part of our lives. Everywhere you turn, you see TikTok videos, even on other platforms. As a result, what is the TikTok stock price? The answer is $0 – at least for the general public now. You cannot invest in TikTok stock as it has yet to go public. But is there a way to invest in something similar? Read on, friends. There is much more to this story.
TikTok ByteDance Controversy
On April 23, 2024, the US Senate voted to ban TikTok if ByteDance doesn’t remove itself from ownership. In other words, the US Senate is trying to force the sale of TikTok to a company they approve of. ByteDance is a Chinese company. The Senate believes TikTok poses a national security threat to anyone downloading the app. They believe they’re mining personal data from your phones that they can use to spy on and weaponize without your knowledge or consent.
The Senate voted to give ByteDance a year to find a buyer. To date, only India has banned the popular social media app. TikTok creators are unhappy because they say it could severely hurt their livelihoods. Will the government follow through with a ban? That remains to be seen, as they’ve threatened this for some time.
What Is TikTok?
I would never think the world needed another social media app, but I was wrong. This ticking time bomb exploded onto the market in 2017 after being launched by Chinese startup ByteDance. There is no TikTok Stock symbol nor a publicly traded stock for ByteDance…yet!
TikTok became the most downloaded app in the US in October 2018, making it the first Chinese app in history to achieve this.
In its most basic form, TikTok is a video-sharing social media app. Users can watch, create, and share 3 to 15-second videos on cell phones. At this point, you’re probably wondering what makes TikTok so special, especially considering the epic failure of its predecessor, Vine.
Besides adding effects like filters, background music, and stickers to their videos, users can also collaborate from different locations across the globe.
Early YouTube
Your dream has come true for anyone who has ever dreamed of creating duets with their loved ones across the globe. As ridiculous as this sounds, the app is extremely addictive and shows with its high levels of engagement. Also, unlike many apps, TikTok feels more like YouTube in the early 2000s. There is a lot of freedom, experimentation, and the ability to use content from the public domain without the fear of copyright infringement. But that appears to be changing as it becomes more popular.
For example, on our YouTube channel, we can never livestream or produce a video with someone else’s copy-written music in the background. On TikTok, that is different. They are working hard to allow those sounds to be licensed on their platform, making it fun!
This is undoubtedly one of the world’s most popular social media apps. Even more impressive is that it’s available in over 150 different markets and 75 languages.
As of March 2020, the app hit close to two billion downloads. Not to mention the 104.7 million downloads in January 2020 alone.
The biggest difference between TikTok and Vine is the timing; TikTok became popular when people were already using Facebook and Instagram stories to share content, which has a very similar format to TikTok and Vine’s. Read on to analyze whether TikTok threatens social media behemoth Facebook and if there’s a TikTok stock.
Facebook is currently the world’s largest online social network, with over 2 billion monthly active users. How its users engage is much different than TikTok in that they exchange messages and share news events, photos, and videos. On the video side, the firm is building a library of premium content and monetizing it via ads or subscription revenue, which is smart.
Facebook refers to this as Facebook Watch. While you might not see it coming, it is coming and should be a big hit! The firm’s ecosystem consists mainly of the Facebook app, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and many features surrounding these products. And there are so many deep things going on with Facebook. You can buy and sell, date, write blogs, grow fan pages, build groups…the list goes on. Advertising revenue represents over 90% of FB’s revenue, with 50% coming from the US and Canada and 25% from Europe. With gross margins above 80%, Facebook operates at a 40%-plus margin.
Don’t despair if you can’t invest in some of your favorite apps. Every day, hundreds of stocks are ripe for trading, that is, if you know how to find them. Besides FB and TWTR, PINS and SNAP are two more social media apps you can trade today on the US stock market. You may not be able to trade TikTok stock, but you can trade $META.
Meta Platforms ($META) TipRanks Stock Forecast Report 3/24
TikTok Stock a Facebook Threat
Did you know that TikTok was the third most downloaded app, falling just behind WhatsApp and Messenger? Shockingly, it was downloaded more than Facebook and Instagram. Wow!
To put this in perspective, TikTok might significantly threaten Facebook. Instagram, one of Facebook’s Products, is trialing a feature called Reels in Brazil, which is widely perceived as a TikTok clone.
While there is no TikTok stock price, Facebook makes a great trading stock. It’s highly liquid and volatile. As a result, you can make (and lose) money with Facebook stock.
Facebook is one of the largest and most popular social media apps you can invest in now. It’s only common sense that if TikTok is doing well, Facebook would be doing well, too.
TikTok Stock Background
TikTok is a private company owned and held by the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance. I need you to hold your breath for this:
“ByteDance is one of the world’s most highly valued privately held startups right now, with a current valuation of around 75 billion dollars”.
Founded in 2012, ByteDance is an internet technology company that owns a series of content platforms. These platforms enable people to connect by consuming and creating content through machine learning technology.
And with nearly 200 million daily active users, the company is here to stay. Too bad we can’t trade TikTok stock,
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What Makes ByteDance Special?
More interestingly, this Internet start-up giant uses Artificial Intelligence to claim its foothold in the global social media networks of the world.
Bytedances’ flagship product, Toutiao, is China’s largest AI-powered content platform. At a glance, Toutiao delivers personalized content recommendations to every user based on their interests.
ByteDance may become the first Chinese company to use AI to profit from social media use in the Western part of the world.
Who Owns ByteDance?
Unfortunately, not me. It is owned by private equity with funding from Sequoia Capital, an American venture capital firm mainly investing in early-stage tech companies like TikTok.
Sequoia Capital backs companies that now control $1.4 trillion combined stock market value.
Buying TikTok Stock and BiteDance
Now, to answer the million-dollar question: How can I buy shares of TikTok stock and BiteDance? Unfortunately, you can’t. Since TikTok and BiteDance are privately owned, their shares aren’t publicly traded. Yet. Someone like you and I can’t buy one single share of a privately owned company until and unless they offer an IPO (Initial Public Offering).
This leads me to the next obvious burning question…
When Will ByteDance Go Public?
Whispers in the trading world alluded to an IPO sometime in 2020, but the company says that the reports about a 2020 listing are false. Recent political scrutiny also will be a major headwind to a 2020 IPO – more on that in our Final Thoughts. As of 2023, there still has been no IPO. So there is no TikTok stock.
Stock Signals & Alerts
Alternative Investing Routes
With these concerns, the TikTok stock price may remain at $0 for the foreseeable future. What do you think? Would you invest in TikTok if it went public? We’d seriously consider being a day-one investor in this IPO.
Since buying TikTok or ByteDance stock from the stock market is impossible, investors might have other possibilities to invest in pre-IPO.
For example, EquityZen is an online marketplace for trading pre-IPO employee shares from privately held companies. Another option is investing in a private equity fund that invests in companies like ByteDance through venture capital rounds.
If you’re curious to know where to find these funds, both EquityZen and AngelList will tell you. However, the problem with these routes is that they usually require an investor to be a high-net-worth individual (basically, you need over $1 million in liquid assets to be in this category of investors).
Final Thoughts: TikTok Stock
Since it’s unlikely that there will be another funding round to raise capital, waiting for ByteDance to become public is the simplest route to invest in TikTok Stock.
On July 30, 2020, US Senators urged the Justice Department to investigate Both Zoom and TikTok.
The US government isn’t the only country concerned with privacy issues from Chinese apps; India banned TikTok and other Chinese apps just last month. Even renowned gamer and social media star Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has announced that he is deleting the TikTok app.
Frequently Asked Questions
TikTok is a privately owned Chinese company, and they don't have a stock symbol. ByteDance owns them.
TikTok doesn't offer a stock symbol to trade because they are a privately owned company.
TikTok is owned privately by ByteDance, so it would be up to them if they would consider doing n Initial Public Offering (IPO).
