Reddit buys TikTok competitor Dubsmash – CNET [CNET]

Reddit on Sunday said it has acquired short-form video app Dubsmash, a rival to video-sharing giant TikTok. As part of the purchase, Reddit will integrate Dubsmash’s video creation tools into the site, “which will empower Reddit’s own creators to express themselves in original and authentic ways,” the company said in a blog post. It didn’t share financial terms of the deal.

“Dubsmash’s mission is to elevate under-represented creators,” Reddit wrote. “While Dubsmash will maintain its own platform and brand, we also look forward to bringing our teams together to combine the unique creator experience of Dubsmash with the community growth engine of Reddit.”

According to Reddit, around 25% of all Black teens in the US are on Dubsmash, and 70% of users are female. Additionally, about 30% of users log in each day to create content, and the platform “enables more than 1 billion video views per month.”

Dubsmash’s whole team, including co-founders Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit immediately, the company said.

A growing number of social media companies are looking to compete against TikTok, which has seen an exponential rise in popularity amid COVID-19 lockdowns, surpassing the 2 billion global download mark early on in the pandemic. Earlier this year, Facebook-owned Instagram launched a short-form video feature called Reels, and YouTube added a Shorts feature to rival both platforms. 

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, has seen significant growth despite a tumultuous year in the US, with the Trump administration pushing to bar downloads of the app, citing data privacy concerns. After insisting ByteDance sell off TikTok’s US business, ByteDance struck a preliminary deal with software company Oracle and retail giant Walmart, but the agreement still needs to be finalized.