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Greetings! It’s hard to walk down the street lately without tripping over someone who has expressed interest in buying TikTok. I’m kidding, but you get the point—everyone from AI startup Perplexity to billionaire Frank McCourt to the YouTube influencer MrBeast claims to be interested. As is often the case, however, it’s the people who aren’t talking that we should take seriously—and that is most obviously Oracle, which as we reported today, is a leading contender in the discussions now underway. Oracle, which as our story said is the candidate favored by management of TikTok’s parent ByteDance, is a key cloud provider for TikTok in the U.S. The three big cloud firms—Google, Microsoft and Amazon—also work with TikTok or ByteDance. It’s possible one or more of these firms are also lurking in the background of the current bidding. As much as some bidders are drawn to TikTok by its audience and ad revenue, TikTok may be even more important to other bidders because it is a big user of cloud services. Capturing more of that spending might warrant one of these big cloud firms making a bid for TikTok. Our cloud database lists TikTok as the fourth biggest customer in the industry, spending between $600 million and $800 million a year, as of two years ago. (Given how much TikTok has grown since then, the spending is likely much higher now). And that number doesn’t include what ByteDance lays out on cloud services for its other apps, such as Douyin in China, plus the billions of dollars a year the Chinese tech giant is spending on cloud to develop artificial intelligence. (ByteDance is a big spender on AI chips, by any measure.) TikTok’s importance as a cloud customer helps explain why both Oracle and Microsoft were key bidders in the 2020 auction of TikTok. Oracle ended up coming out of that situation with the goods (for more details, see this story). Given that TikTok is likely spending more on cloud services now, all the cloud firms have a reason to cosy up to TikTok and ByteDance any way they can. The public relations professionals who write up corporate earnings releases are expert in obscuring the ugly side of business, and highlighting anything that is at all positive. Take BuzzFeed, the incredible shrinking media business, which reported its fourth quarter results today. Revenue fell 20% compared with a year earlier, bringing the full year revenue decline to 18%. In 2023, revenue had shrunk 26%. Despite that sorry performance, BuzzFeed looked on the bright side. In the fourth quarter, “audiences spent more time consuming BuzzFeed content…than that of any other digital media company in its competitive set,” the company said, without identifying who else is in its “competitive set.” It also noted that, in the quarter, the percentage of people who return to BuzzFeed.com or its app more than once in a week rose to its highest level in two years. Strange, then, that ad revenue fell 19% over the same period.
- Representatives of President Donald Trump’s family held talks to take a stake in Binance.US., the American entity of crypto exchange Binance, while Binance founder Changpeng Zhao has been pushing for a pardon, The Wall Street Journal reported.
- Salesforce is considering pricing changes to spur adoption of its Agentforce product, which lets customers build AI agents using their corporate data, The Information reported. Salesforce has been having a tough time getting customers to commit to using Agentforce, our story said.
- Comcast and the International Olympic Committee have signed a multi-year extension for NBCUniversal to exclusively air the Olympic games in the U.S. through 2036.
- Tesla warned the Trump administration that Trump’s trade war could make it a target for retaliatory tariffs imposed by other countries, the Financial Times reported.
- Google announced an experimental feature on Thursday that gives users more tailored responses and personalized recommendations from Google’s Gemini chatbot by connecting it to their Google Search history.
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