Yahoo Finance

All right, we are quickly approaching a US ban of TikTok. That ban is set to take effect on Saturday, multiple names swirling around a potential purchase of the social media app and for more, we're bringing in who else, of course, Yahoo Finance Tech editor Dan Howley. Dan, this one I'm I'm having trouble actually keeping up with the headlines today because reporters and they keep, I got all kinds of folks kicking the tires. I got Amazon, I got Apple oven, and now I have the now I got the FT telling me maybe Blackstone and Horwitz. What do you make of all this? Are you surprised by this interest?

Uh I'm not surprised at all. I mean look, this is the the social network that rivals Instagram rivals, you know, meta Zuckerberg. This is a huge deal, not only that, but also because of the audience that it reaches uh primarily younger audience, though there are obviously plenty of uh adults that use this. Uh I had to delete it because it's just, you know, too addicting. I'm still on Instagram, so it's you know, six to one half a dozen the other. But yeah, I think that this is just uh a matter of uh this is the only other platform that really is out there that manages to rival the biggest. Uh and 170 million US users, you know, it's it's where all the the the trends come from, you know, you know what a Tik Tok trend is if I tell you what it is. You can imagine, you know, people doing dumb dances or I don't know, putting their hands in toasters because whatever. Uh that's that's really what what it comes down to is just the the audience and the reach. And I think everybody is salivating at the idea of potentially getting their hands on this and there's there's a different a bunch of different reports as to whether it'll be the the entire service. Uh it'll be a lease or or a licensing rather of the algorithm. Uh you know, bottom line is this this deadline is approaching on Saturday. Uh and so if they don't get anything, we could see Trump potentially push the the deadline again, uh which at that point, I mean come on, are we actually, you know, going to see it banned? Uh or it could go offline again uh like we saw just just uh prior to the inauguration.

What did you make when you saw that headline drop today and I was slacking with you when Amazon came out. I mean Amazon's interest. Strategically, does that make sense to you?

Yeah, I mean it's interesting because I saw someone uh uh I can't recall their their name but they they tweeted, you know, this is a uh direct kind of uh move by Amazon to squash a squash rather a uh competitor, right? Uh there's the shopping aspect of Tik Tok. You know, it's the same thing with with Instagram where, you know, you see something you get an ad and you're like, oh maybe I should buy that. Same thing with with Tik Tok, you're swiping, you're swiping then you're like, oh this something looks interesting. Let me you know, throw 50 bucks at it or 20 bucks at it. And uh you know, it's taking away people from going to to Amazon and using their own uh effort where they live stream and try to get people uh to buy. So, you know, it would make sense for Amazon, but I think that that competitive factor uh would would be an issue when it comes to antitrust enforcement.

I don't know if that's going to be a problem going forward depending on the makeup of the uh the FTC, but it is a very uh important transactional platform, the effectiveness of the click through and the purchase is much higher than a lot of these other platforms that have been around a very long time. So you see why Amazon would want to own something like that, especially with the intelligence of the algorithm. Again, it might be an FTC thing at the end of the day. Again, we don't know if there's going to be that type of regulation that would stop something like this, but the fact that you see these bidders, especially private equity sniffing around this thing, just tells you the valuation is probably going to go up from here.