TikTok earlier today announced that it had officially recorded that approximately 1 billion people use its service every month. This number is simply massive and is higher than what some countries population is. This simple fact means that on our planet about one in seven and a half people are regularly watching short-form videos of dancing, dangerous and sometimes idiotic trends. I am not lying with actual educational content; you can find some real educational stuff on the platform.
If we have to compare this number, then Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, reported that in June, it had 2.9 billion monthly active users, which is up by 7% year over year. However, the growth of TikTok is faster than a teenager’s hormonal growth, and this new user data marks a 45% increase in monthly active users since July 2020, when it had only 689 million users. And the billion mark also makes TikTok the first-ever non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion global downloads.
PARIS, FRANCE – MARCH 05: In this photo illustration, the social media application logo, Tik Tok is displayed on the screen of an iPhone on March 05, 2019, in Paris, France. The social network broke the rules for the protection of children’s online privacy (COPPA) and was fined $ 5.7 million. The fact TikTok criticized is quite serious in the United States, the platform, which currently has more than 500 million users worldwide, collected data that should not have asked minors. TikTok, also known as Douyin in China, is a media app for creating and sharing short videos. Owned by ByteDance, Tik Tok is a leading video platform in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world. In 2018, the application gained popularity and became the most downloaded app in the U.S. in October 2018. (Photo by Chesnot/Getty Images)
The competition that TikTok poses to Western tech giants is extremely high, with the then-president Trump even imposing a total ban on the app, and India has already banned the service making most of the influencer’s on TikTok without influence. Instagram, owned by Facebook, has radically shifted its focus, declaring that it’s no longer a photo-sharing app.
The company is heavily promoting Reels, which is the feature TikTok is well known for, and even discussion forums like Reddit are enticed by the promise of short-form video feeds. YouTube also has that trend, by the way, but Instagram went a step further and has advised creators that if they recycle watermarked TikToks as posts on Reels, the content will be less discoverable. Mark Zuckerberg wants to remove TikTok as the competitor for his company platforms.
Ironically, the biggest markets of TikTok lies in the United States, Europe, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, while its parent company ByteDance is headquartered in China.
