Reddit is buying TikTok rival Dubsmash
Message board juggernaut Reddit is accelerating its push into video, snapping up a sharing platform that is popular with young people and women.
Reddit said in a statement on Sunday that it has acquired TikTok rival Dubsmash. It did not disclose the financial terms of the deal.
Dubsmash allows users to create and share video content, and it’s especially popular with young, diverse audiences. About 25% of Black teens in the United States use the app. Women make up 70% of Dubsmash users, and roughly 30% of users log in every day, according to Reddit.
The New York-based platform enables more than 1 billion video views per month, Reddit added.
Dubsmash’s three co-founders, Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel, and Tim Specht, will be joining Reddit with immediate effect. While Dubsmash will maintain its own platform and brand, its video creation tools will be integrated into Reddit, which is best known for its freewheeling message boards.
Reddit has allowed users to upload and share their own videos since 2017, and the segment has grown quickly. The number of videos posted to the platform has doubled in 2020, according to the company.
“We are excited to accelerate Reddit’s focus on video, bringing our tools and technology to their passionate, rapidly-growing user base and sparking evermore forms of creation,” Dash, Drüppel and Specht said in a statement.
An earlier iteration of Dubsmash was launched from Berlin by Drüppel, Roland Grenke and Daniel Taschik.
Social media platforms have in recent years invested heavily in short videos, spurred on by the success of TikTok and Snapchat. Facebook’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube have launched their own products designed to compete with TikTok.