Just ten days ago, the film producer and co-owner of the viral video app Triller, Ryan Kavanaugh, assured CNBC that his product is the adult version of TikTok and showed his confidence in reaching the Chinese application. President Donald Trump may have given the definitive accolade or the deadly lace to the company after learning that the president has opened a verified account on this social network. In his three days at Triller, the Republican has attracted 11,400 followers and posted four videos.
The videos bear the genuine brand of the house . The first of them is a compilation of clips of the president while his voice sounds exclaiming "I am a professional of technology" and "nobody can do it like me". The others basically consist of attacks and taunts at his Democratic rival ("Joe Biden has no idea," he says in the second).
donaldjtrump * #trillerlife * Triller - Your life in video
I'M NOW ON TRILLER! 🇺🇸 #MAGA #KAG # Trump2020 #VoteRed
Triller was, until Trump's arrival, a relative unknown despite having been on the market since 2015 (two years longer than TikTok itself). The functionalities of the Californian application (its headquarters are in Los Angeles) are very similar to those of the Chinese leader: it claims to allow the creation of “professional-looking videos” and, like TikTok and its new rival Reels (from Instagram), uses of artificial intelligence to edit the content recorded by users. It also allows registered users to add filters to modify the appearance, insert songs to turn short videos into musicals, offers personalization possibilities with text, drawings and emojis and collaborate with friends in group productions.
Among its main attractions are the accounts of stars like Justin Bieber or Selena Gomez, rappers like Snoop Dogg or Lil Wayne, or former TikTok influencers like Griffin Johnson, Noah Beck or Anthony Reeves. And that, not to mention its catalog of music videos thanks to its collaboration agreements with Sony, Universal, Warner and Spotify.
Ultimatum
Luck (in the form of Donald Trump) has teamed up with Triller (and other apps like Zynn, Dubsmash, and Byte). On Saturday, the president announced that he is giving ByteDance, owner of TikTok, 90 days to end its operations in the United States and dispose of the collected data. In addition to TikTok, the Trump Administration has taken action against other companies such as WeChat, messaging software that has evolved into a multi-service application. With Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, it has been fighting an intense battle for some time, especially for the dominance of this company over the new 5G technology.
As a result, Triller downloads have increased by more than 35 million in the US in recent days and by more than 250 million worldwide, according to TechCrunch. Of course, it has a long way to go, as TikTok surpassed the 2 billion download barrier in April.
The Los Angeles company, however, assures that its success is independent of the fall from grace of TikTok. In October, the app was valued at $ 130 million. Now, he is looking for a new round of financing that allows him to become a unicorn (a startup with a value of more than 1 billion). Its founder and CEO, Mike Lu, assures that part of his success resides in the entry into the capital of Proxima Media. This is an investment fund based in Hollywood, owned by the aforementioned Ryan Kavanaugh, who has produced films like Hancock , The fast and the furious or The Social Network (which, paradoxically, told the story of Facebook).
It has been Kavanaugh who has contributed the media exposure, in addition to the agreements with the record companies or the big names that have signed up for the app when it is still an absolutely minority option. "Ryan is the best when it comes to Hollywood, entertainment and the media," Lu recently told TechCrunch. “I give [Proxima Media] a lot of credit for helping us get to this stage, this massive growth. I don't think we could have done it without them. "
Kavanaugh, incidentally, accused Spain in 2014 of harboring alarming anti-Semitism in response to a letter signed by a collective of artists, including Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Pedro Almodóvar, in which the Israeli army was accused of genocide.
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