Reddit has acquired Dubsmash, a video social media app, stepping more directly into the growing competition with TikTok.
Reddit is known mostly for its online communities where users trade messages and pictures. But video is a fast-growing part of the social network, and Reddit says the number of videos posted on its site has doubled in the past year. Adding Dubsmash gives 15-year-old Reddit access to a deep well of video content and access to popular video-editing technology. Financial terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed.
“We want to continue our journey to bring best in class video products to our users, and now Reddit users,” Dubsmash cofounder Suchit Dash said in a statement. “We believe in the idea of connecting creators around interests and topics, something Reddit has pioneered, in our growing Dubsmash community.”
Dubsmash has already lived out several lives. It was originally founded in 2015 and enjoyed an initial surge of popularity before its app faded from the download charts. It has been revitalized alongside the rise of TikTok as more people become interested in posting their own videos. Dubsmash now generates more than 1 billion video views a month.
Dubsmash has consistently carved out a singular niche for itself: the destination of choice for Black and Latino teenagers. A quarter of all Black teens in the U.S. use Dubsmash, the company says, and overall, nearly 30% of Dubsmash users post a video each day.
There is a growing arms race to take on TikTok, which has surged in popularity over the last two years to nearly 700 million global users. In the last year, Instagram has debuted its own software to make short videos, and Snapchat is doling out $1 million a day to encourage users to publicly share their videos, dispensing the funds to whoever posts the most popular content.
