Where did you get that “simple calculation” from? If Average user is worth to TikTok a dollar per day that means that ad buyers are willing to give it to TikTok from their advertising and marketing budget. Which means that the average user should spend at least few grands each year on advertised products and services, which does not seem likely.

Also, this is not how valuations are estimated. 180 billion _per year_ is a huge amount (for comparison Apple revenue for 2019 is 260B). One applies a revenue multiple that depends on the stage of the company and industry but for early booming social media site is in the range of 20-40. So the estimate of 105-110 probably comes from the range of 3-5 B yearly revenue estimate

Yes, that's correct. A dollar per day is huge, and that would bring the valuation close to a revenue multiple of one, which is madness by market standards. If you would make it 10 cents per day, which seems more reasonable according to people more informed than me, that would become simply a multiple of 10, which is still low, as you pointed it out. We can keep changing the variables, divide it by 2 even, but the point i tried to make is that it seems not that crazy of a valuation after all if you consider 500mi users as an average

An averge tiktok user doesn't make a dollar a day not sure they have the most valuable userbase.

let's not quibble over semantics of "simple"

anyway the valuation clearly must include investor perception of their growth trajectory.

I think the more appropriate wording would be "completely pulled out of thin air and not relevant calculation"

One dollar per day!? That's an obscenely high level. Facebook is one of the highest revenue per user social media companies by orders if magnitude and they made worldwide an average of 7.26 per user in an entire financial quarter, which is like 8 or 9 cents per day. If tiktok is outdoing facebook by a full order of magnitude, and has 1/5th the users, even with identical growth expectations they'd be twice the valuation at like 1.2 trillion dollars. A couple billion in revenues plus investor belief in growth potential is more than enough to justify a 105 billion dollar valuation (nobody said investors can't overvalue companies either, look at wework). I dont think they're anywhere near as obscenely profitable as making a dollar per day across all international users, they're going to be orders of magnitude removed from that.

I wonder what the amount spent by users on advertised products per quarter is... presumably more but that seems like a lot especially if that is worldwide.

$1/user/day is a huge overestimate. Facebook manage a fraction of that.

180b/0.5 = each user (including inactive ones) worth 1$/day?

200M DAU so way above 500M users