From Gossip to a Massive Data Leak: Tea's Wild Ride

Every now and then, an app comes out of nowhere and completely takes over the charts. In the last few weeks, that app was Tea.

Tea is a twist on the social network, giving women (yes, just women) a platform to share stories, compare notes, and, well, spill the tea on their dating experiences. It's a clever idea that has clearly struck a chord, and the numbers it's posting are staggering.

Since its release in January of 2023, Tea was downloaded 3.2M times, according to Appfigures Intelligence, but 2.5M of those came in the last 30 days.

That's because Tea started going viral on TikTok in mid-July.

Downloads exploded, growing nearly 10x overnight from around 15K per day to a peak of 142K.

And downloads are only half the story. What's even more impressive is that Tea isn't just growing but also earning.

Of the more than $1.8M consumers spent on Tea since inception, roughly $770K came in the last 30 days, according to our estimates, and more than $1M in the 60 days.

On Thursday, Tea hit its highest day of revenue, hauling a whopping $91K of gross revenue in a single day - more than double its previous all-time high, which happened the day before.

We've seen social apps like Tea go viral and get downloads before, but seeing their revenue spike almost as quickly is less common, especially for a social network. I know it isn't really, but it kind of is.

The Abrupt Ending that Wasn't...

Last week the I thought Tea's run would be over.

Someone discovered that Tea stored some of its verification data, including driver's licenses and selfies, in a publicly accessible folder online. That someone promptly downloaded them all and spread them around the internet which caused a lot of discomfort. A few days later, someone else was able to get private chats and those also made their way to the internet.

Tea called it a breach, but even though I'm not a lawyer, I can already see this turning into a barrage of lawsuits claiming Tea was negligent and that could push a small company with not-a-lot-of-funding into bankruptcy.

Downloads started declining fairly quickly, and that's when I thought Tea was done for. But no news is bad news, apparently, because Tea bounced right back up within a few days and is now the #2 most popular app in the US App Store right below ChatGPT.

That's amazing! But men can spill the tea too...

And while Tea is getting popular, a clone aimed at men called TeaOnHer came out a few days ago and while it has just 2 stars on the App Store, we estimate the app was downloaded over 275K times in the last few days.

Things move fast these days!