(Reuters) -Social network firm Reddit said on Sunday it would buy short-video platform Dubsmash, becoming the latest company to expand in a space dominated by Chinese-owned TikTok.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a spokeswoman for Reddit said the acquisition was based on a combination of cash and stock.
The success of ByteDance’s TikTok has prompted many social media companies to add short-video services to their platforms, with Snapchat Inc rolling out “Spotlight” in November and Facebook Inc launching “Instagram Reels” earlier this year.
Both Facebook and Snap had approached Dubsmash about a deal earlier this year and talks had progressed far enough to include discussions of a price tag in “the hundreds of millions of dollars,” the Information reported https://www.theinformation.com/articles/facebook-snap-held-talks-to-buy-tiktok-rival-dubsmash in August.
Reddit said in a blog post https://redditblog.com/2020/12/13/reddit-welcomes-video-platform-dubsmash-to-team that the deal would give its users, who can already upload and stream videos, access to Dubsmash’s editing and short-video creation tools.
Founded in 2013, Dubsmash became popular as a platform that let its users create short-form lip-sync videos to popular movie dialogues or sound bites and share them with other users.
Dubsmash’s mobile app has been downloaded 196.8 million times globally since its launch, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. For comparison, TikTok’s mobile app has been downloaded just under 2.6 billion times globally since its launch, the data showed.
San Francisco-based Reddit added that Dubsmash would maintain its own platform and brand.
Dubsmash’s entire team, including co-founders Suchit Dash, Jonas Drüppel and Tim Specht, will join Reddit.
(Reporting by Kartik Mehindru, Shubham Kalia and Ayanti Bera in Bengaluru; Editing by Aditya Soni and Amy Caren Daniel)
