Reddit has bought video service Dubsmash for an undisclosed amount. Dubsmash is seen as a competitor to TikTok and Reddit hopes to integrate more short videos on the platform with the acquisition.
Reddit writes that it wants to incorporate Dubsmash’s tools into the Reddit app and website. At the same time, the app will continue to exist separately and will not change anything, the social network writes.
It is not known what Reddit paid for the company. The acquisition is effective immediately and all developers of Dubsmash will go along.
Dubsmash is seen as a major competitor of TikTok, although the latter is much more popular. Dubsmash mainly has a lot of young users, who can create and share short videos.
According to Reddit, the service provides “a platform for creators who are under-represented on social media.” It is not known how many users Dubsmash has, but thirty percent of them would log in daily at least and the majority would be female.
News of the deal comes as big tech scrambles to acquire space in the massive video-sharing app market following the success of TikTok, which is now under sustained pressure from the US government over its Chinese ownership.
Dubsmash, which allows users to lip-sync to popular music or dance along to their favourite songs, has been described by tech press as the “number two” video-sharing app online.
Neither company has disclosed how much Reddit paid for Dubsmash, though the tech news website The Information earlier this year reported that a similar offer from Facebook had been in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
