In a statement to Advertising panel, CEO of Triller Mike Lu states that there is no legal definition of monthly active users, and Triller will no longer share monthly active users (MAU) or daily active users (DAU) as they do not accurately represent the company’s value.
“There is no legal definition of MAU / DAU,” says Lu. “For example, if someone is trying to compare TikTok’s MAU / SAD with ours – which means they are saying that we have the same definition of MAU / SAD – there is an inherent misunderstanding about the business and the business model from Triller. It’s like trying to compare a fish and a bicycle. “
Triller, which was acquired by Proxima Media in October 2019, gained prominence shortly after its December 2019 press release, announcing that it had as many users as TikTok – which had 26.5 million active users per month in 2019, according to a report by Reuters – positioning itself as the main competitor of the Chinese-owned short video service which now has more than 100 million monthly active users in the United States in August 2020 and 689 million monthly active users globally in July 2020, according to figures included in TikTok’s lawsuit against the United States government opened last year.
Triller’s assertions helped reinforce its speech to potential investors, but the different figures it reported to rights holders highlight the chasm between it and its larger rival. (Last September, a few weeks after the numbers of TikTok users became public, Triller said The Verge which had 100 million monthly active users and more than 27 million daily users.) Lu says the company is focused on increasing content “outside the network”, which devalues the use of metrics such as monthly and daily active users.
“We are an open ecosystem, not a walled garden app like TikTok or other social networks,” continues Lu. “Triller’s value is in monetizing users, not MAU or DAU. In the past, the press has had a hard time understanding this. Therefore, in the past year, we have chosen to stop sharing any MAU or SAD data and we have no intention of doing so in the future. It has no relevance to our value or our monetization. Exclusive to Triller, our model encourages users to interact with our content ‘outside the network’, which, by definition, says that we are moving away from MAU and DAU ”, says Lu. “We value Triller for its ability to monetize our users and believe that we do it better than any of our competitors. We are proud of the fact that we are the only app to reach number 1 in the app store in more than 50 countries simultaneously. “
As he prepares to become a publicly traded company, Triller hired heavyweights from the music industry, including former chief financial officer of Warner Chappell Paul Kahn in January to the same position, after hiring Tuhin Roy – formerly senior vice president of new digital business and innovation for Universal Music Group – as president of business operations for Triller and chief operating officer for Proxima Media last November.
If Triller becomes a publicly traded company, it will have to report its financial results, including key performance metrics that traditionally include active monthly users for social media, to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In 2018, the SEC charged online marketing firm Endurance International Group Holdings Inc $ 8 million to inflate the number of subscribers, and two of the company’s former executives paid more than $ 1.5 million in “severance, interest and fines” to settle similar charges without admitting guilt.
Although TikTok has maintained its growth, despite strong scrutiny from the Trump Administration, Triller has repeatedly been accused of increasing its number of users in the past year, denying all claims.
Six former employees said Business Insider that the 13 million monthly active users that Triller claimed to have in October 2019, when Proxima Media acquired the company, were inaccurate and fluctuated between 1 million and 2.5 million monthly active users, which Lu called “inaccurate information” .
Last August, Triller threatened to sue the intelligence company Apptopia for counting TechCrunch that the Triller has been downloaded 52 million times, just weeks after the Triller released a press release stating that it reached 250 million global downloads on Android and iOS. Apptopia dropped its claims after the lawsuit was threatened, but its competing intelligence company, Sensor Tower, told the publication that Triller was downloaded 45.6 million times to that point, echoing the original Apptopia report. “No application intelligence company provided our data,” Lu told TechCrunch at the time. “Whatever numbers they provide are not relevant or accurate to our numbers.”
The video service is currently in a fight with Universal Music Group after the record company removed its catalog from the platform, declaring that Triller withheld payments and refuses to negotiate a new licensing agreement. In response, a spokesman for Triller claimed that it did not withhold any payments and that the company “does not need an agreement with UMG to continue operating as usual, since the relevant artists are already shareholders or partners of Triller and therefore , can authorize their direct use. “