U.S. TikTok Deadline Extended Again

By Brittany Siminitz | April 07, 2025

The deadline for a sale of TikTok has again been extended, with the Trump administration giving the platform another 75 days from the previous April 5 cutoff.

There were reports that the White House had been nearing a deal for TikTok’s owner ByteDance to retain a stake in a planned U.S. spin-off of the app, but the Chinese company has apparently now refused to accept the deal.

“ByteDance has been in discussion with the U.S. government regarding a potential solution for TikTok U.S.,” a ByteDance spokesperson said in a statement on TikTok’s website. “An agreement has not been executed. There are key matters to be resolved. Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law.”

Sweeping tariffs announced last week by Trump may also work to kill any deal, depending on whether or not China takes the bait in the form of the president’s negotiation tactics. According to Bloomberg, Trump “reiterated that he would, in particular, be willing to offer tariff relief for China if Beijing approved the sale of the U.S. operations of ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok social video app.”

Brands that have been using TikTok for marketing appear to be preparing for the loss of the app’s existence in the States: Digiday said such companies have been spending more on platforms like Instagram and YouTube, after January’s brief blackout of the Chinese-owned platform “served as a wake up call.” Relying on a single channel, no matter how popular it may be, is risky, and diversifying social strategies is most likely the right move.

“In 2024, brands’ spending on influencer marketing platform Collabstr was split evenly between Instagram and TikTok campaigns, according to Collabstr cofounder Kyle Dulay. Between Jan. 18 and March 18, however, the volume of TikTok orders on Collabstr were equal to only 47 percent of the volume of Instagram orders on the platform,” the Digiday article said. “In the months following the January outage, influencer marketing company BENlabs observed several of its clients move their creator investments from TikTok to other platforms, with one snack brand whose spending on TikTok had previously accounted for roughly 50 percent of its influencer marketing budget shifting all of its expenditures to Meta platforms instead.”

For those jewelers that have found success on TikTok, it wouldn’t do to abandon the platform completely—only to diversify and try to regain or duplicate your audience across other social apps, in the case that TikTok is indeed gone in June.