• by Colin Kirkland , March 12, 2025

With its existence in the U.S. being threatened by a delayed sell-off bill, TikTok and Oxford Economics have decided to present another economic impact report, aiming to make a case for the ByteDance-owned company playing a vital role in the American economy.

According to the report, there are 7.5 million businesses on the platform employing over 28 million workers.

Over 3.1 million jobs directly use TikTok in their work, either by creating content for the platform or managing their accounts, while over 1.6 million workers indirectly benefit from the platform in areas like “lead generation for sales teams, customer engagement for marketing, or product teams examining user feedback on the platform,” the company says.

A total of 4.7 million full-time U.S. jobs are directly tied to the use of TikTok.

In its previous report, TikTok reported that its platform generated $14.7 billion for American small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in 2023, with the largest impacts in California, Texas, Florida, New York and Illinois.

TikTok has since released state-by-state economic fact sheets that show how the platform impacts a state's job market, GDP and more. For example, in New York, 438 thousand businesses use TikTok and in 2023, SMBs' use of TikTok as an ad and marketing platform contributed $1.8 billion to GDP, generating around $410 million in federal, state, and local tax revenue in the state.

However, TikTok's urge to defend itself economically to American voters and the U.S. federal government may not be worth the effort at this point.

Not only has the sell-off bill already been passed into law -- despite the 75-day delay by President Donald Trump -- but TikTok has done little to assure government officials regarding data privacy concerns stemming from the company's connection to the Chinese Communist Party.

While cybersecurity officials have kept their briefings on the app top secret, it is notable that the vast majority of U.S. elected representatives across the House and Senate voted for a ban of TikTok.

As the Trump administration continues to talk with prospective U.S. buyers, advertisers are beginning to flee the app, reallocating ad dollars to competing platforms in preparation for its possible extinction.