Numbers that scare Mark Zuckerberg: TikTok hits 1 billion monthly users, many of them Americans

Tram Ho

Yesterday, TikTok revealed that it has 1 billion active users globally every month. This number clearly shows the steady growth of this short-form video application.

Specifically, the app owned by Chinese conglomerate ByteDance has reported a spike in users over the past few years. Notably, among them, a large number of US users joined in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

TikTok says it had around 55 million global users in January 2018. That number has grown to more than 271 million in December 2018 and 507 million in December 2019. The company reported nearly 700 million monthly active users last summer.

By comparison, Facebook said in the second quarter it had 3.51 billion monthly users across all of its apps, up from 3.45 billion in the first quarter.

Con số khiến Mark Zuckerberg lo sợ: TikTok cán mốc 1 tỷ người dùng mỗi tháng, rất nhiều trong số đó là người Mỹ - Ảnh 1.

Despite being the leader, launching one of the most successful short-form video applications, many competitors are large technology companies racing to create versions of short-video applications like TikTok.

Facebook launched its TikTok clone, Instagram Reels also went viral last August. Snap announced a similar feature called Spotlight last year. Google’s YouTube launched its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts, last September.

TikTok has managed to grow despite a difficult year. Just last year, ByteDance – the parent company of TikTok, the world’s most valuable startup is still under pressure from many sides. The Trump administration wants the company to sell off its US assets. Meanwhile at home, they are under pressure as the Beijing government aggressively regulates technology startups. Not to mention that India has blacklisted some of the company’s social networking apps.

However, overcoming all those obstacles, ByteDance still thrived. The company’s shares are traded on the private market at a valuation of more than $250 billion. In its latest funding round, ByteDance reached a value of $180 billion, an increase of $20 billion from three years ago. However, a Bloomberg source revealed that in the private market, a few investors have recently sold shares of this company at a valuation of $ 350 billion.

Con số khiến Mark Zuckerberg lo sợ: TikTok cán mốc 1 tỷ người dùng mỗi tháng, rất nhiều trong số đó là người Mỹ - Ảnh 2.

Founded by a 35-year-old man named Zhang Yiming, Bytedance started as a developer of short joke sharing apps before creating the Toutiao service. They have spent years building their user base and improving their engagement system.

The company then started getting involved in the expansion of Tik Tok and a number of other platforms featuring everything from rumors to celebrity trivia.

TikTok alone has now become a “golden egg” for ByteDance. This short-form video recording application along with Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok) has recorded more than $78 million in user spending in April 2019. This amount helps TikTok to surpass Youtube and become the highest earning non-game app in the world.

The simple TikTok video sharing app makes it possible for users to watch and create short videos with music, stickers, and animations as special effects. It has always been in the top of the most downloaded apps worldwide since ByteDance launched in 2016.

TikTok’s success is owed to its powerful algorithm, which predicts what users want to see next. TikTok tracks usage very closely and considers hundreds of data points, from which websites users browse, what they type, to their typing tempo and patterns.

Source: CNBC

Share the news now

Source : Genk