TikTok competitors Byte and Clash form merger to take on video giant Clash\/ByteThe battle to try and compete with TikTok in the shortform video space has just become less bloody, as two of TikTok\u2019s competitors have merged. [jwplayer ZXB9LNVP] Clash, set up by former Vine star Brendon McNerney, has agreed to buy Byte, the app developed by Vine founder Dom Hofman, for an undisclosed sum. The purchase, which is in part funded and enacted by a separate round of seed funding for Clash from Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian\u2019s Seven Seven Six and two other investors, is an unusual one. \u201cIt\u2019s going to put Clash in a whole new ballgame, where we have support I couldn\u2019t even imagine,\u201d says McNerney, who declined to share the amount invested in his company. Clash is by far the smaller of the two apps, with 500,000 users as of fall 2020, its founder McNerney confirmed. By comparison, Byte has 4.5 million users. What\u2019s more, Clash is going to take itself off app stores, encourage its users to migrate over to the bigger Byte, and then rebrand the app as Clash in the coming months. \u201cIt may seem like a confusing move, but Byte has the userbase,\u201d says McNerney. \u201cWe have the creative tools, and we want to point people to the future home of Clash. \u201cThe plan over the next few months is to relaunch the Byte app as Clash,\u201d says McNerney. \u201cThis relaunch will have all our monetization tools live.\u201d Clash has placed its focus on supporting creators\u2019 ability to monetize their content \u2014 a bugbear many early TikTok users had until the app launched its Creator Fund, which gives creators over a certain size a share of financial funding to keep making videos. \u201cWe\u2019re 100% merging both of these communities together,\u201d says McNerney. \u201cThere\u2019s such a fluidity between not just the types of creators, but even the types of content on both platforms. Dom [Hofman] has done such a great job in building these creative tools. The thing we\u2019re focusing on is not disturbing the experience on either of these platforms.\u201d McNerney admitted the merger took him by surprise. \u201cIt\u2019s definitely unusual, and not something we were expecting to have happen,\u201d he says. Hofman, who was not made available for interview, will not be staying on with Byte, McNerney says. \u201cHim and his team are not a part of this deal. They\u2019re going on to another venture, which is exciting for them,\u201d he explains. \u201cThey\u2019ll be making an announcement on that.\u201d Hofman and Byte were convinced to sell up because of the pro-creator stance of Clash, the latter\u2019s owner says. \u201cIt was something they had been considering but hadn\u2019t necessarily made any move on,\u201d he says. The whole process of the deal took place in \u201ca few weeks.\u201d \u201cIt happened rather quickly,\u201d says McNerney. Negotiations didn\u2019t begin until 2021. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be working in the next month or two integrating all our tools [into Clash],\u201d he adds. \u201cWe want to make sure the user experience is largely unedited as far as what Byte users can expect. There are tons of them and we don\u2019t want to disturb their experience.\u201d McNerney\u2019s goal isn\u2019t necessarily for the newly-merged app\u2019s five million users to take on TikTok\u2019s 690 million users worldwide. \u201cTo be explicit, Clash is the monetization platform,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat we see as a massive missing pillar in the shortform video world is a place where creators can monetize.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
TikTok competitors Byte and Clash form merger to take on video giant Clash\/ByteThe battle to try and compete with TikTok in the shortform video space has just become less bloody, as two of TikTok\u2019s competitors have merged. [jwplayer ZXB9LNVP] Clash, set up by former Vine star Brendon McNerney, has agreed to buy Byte, the app […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}