By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
TikTok says it has garnered 1 billion monthly active global users, a steady growth of the short-form video app, but still trails the 3.51 billion monthly active users on Facebook, the most popular social network worldwide.
TikTok, privately held and owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has reported a surge in users over the past few years, with a large amount of its United States audience joining amid the pandemic, per reporting by CNBC.
It had about 55 million global users by January 2018. That number grew to more than 271 million by December 2018 and 507 million by December 2019. The company reported nearly 700 million monthly active users last summer.
In comparison, Facebook said in the second quarter (Q2 2021) it had 3.51 billion monthly users across its family of apps, up from 3.45 billion in Q1 2021.
Still, Facebook launched one of the most successful short-form video apps, with many of its large tech competitors racing to create their own versions.
Facebook launched its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels, broadly last August. Snap announced a similar feature called Spotlight last year. Google’s YouTube launched its competitor, Shorts, last September.
TikTok managed to grow despite a rocky year. The company faced a slew of setbacks, including a possible U.S. ban after the former Trump administration deemed its data storage and security a national security risk.
TikTok was to be sold to an American company if it wanted to keep operating widely, with Oracle later being named as its “trusted technology provider.”
However, President Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House allowed the company to continue operating as normally. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Oracle deal had been “shelved indefinitely.”
Biden this summer also signed an executive order that sets criteria for the government to evaluate the risk of apps connected to foreign adversaries.
Chinese competition against Western tech giants
TechCrunch adds that with one billion users on TikTok, about one in seven-and-a-half people are regularly watching short-form videos of dancing, dangerous “milk crate challenges” and even actual educational content.
TikTok’s growth is rapid – this new user data marks a 45 per cent increase in monthly active users since July 2020, when it had 689 million users.
Plus, this July, TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion global downloads, per app analytics firm SensorTower.
The competition that TikTok poses to Western tech giants is palpable – Instagram, owned by Facebook, has radically shifted its focus, declaring that it is no longer a photo-sharing app.
Instagram is heavily promoting Reels, its TikTok clone, and even discussion forums like Reddit are enticed by the promise of short-form video feeds.
Instagram even advised creators that if they recycle watermarked TikToks as posts on Reels, the content will be less discoverable.
TikTok said its biggest markets are in the U.S., Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia, even though its parent company ByteDance is headquartered in China.
TikTok has faced severe regulatory threats in recent years.
TechCrunch recalls that former President Donald Trump attempted to block U.S. business transactions with TikTok. In India, home to 1.36 billion people, TikTok has been banned since last year.
Despite it all, TikTok continues to exhibit impressive growth. Last month, its parent ByteDance bought the VR hardware company Pico, a potential future expansion into VR.
It is not a coincidence that, all the while, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn his trillion-dollar platform into a “metaverse” company.
