TikTok has reached a new milestone: more than one billion monthly active users worldwide. While it still has a long way to go before it catches up with Facebook in terms of users, TikTok is quickly gaining ground in this competitive market.
The short videos app, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, has jumped in popularity since its launch in September 2016. TikTok said it had around 55 million users worldwide as of January 2018, which rose to over 271 million in December 2018, 508 million in December 2019 and 689 million in July 2020.
Today, the social network has reached a new milestone: one billion monthly active users. ” Over a billion people around the world now come to TikTok every month to have fun by learning, laughing or discovering something new », Can we read in the ad. ” We are honored to be a home to our immensely diverse community of families, small businesses and creators who turn into our favorite stars. “.
TikTok’s popularity on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic
TikTok saw a surge in downloads amid the COVID-19 pandemic, breaking the 2 billion global download mark in August of last year. Today the app has been downloaded over 3 billion times, becoming the first non-Facebook application to reach such a number.
With its 1 billion active users, TikTok is still far from the American giant Facebook, which reported 2.9 billion monthly active users at the end of June 2021. However, we had seen that TikTok had recently managed to beat another of its competitors in terms of screen time. Indeed, for the first time in its history, US and UK users spent more time on TikTok than on YouTube this summer.
To protect its billion active users, TikTok recently added new features to its short videos app. Indeed, the company for example recently committed against suicide by offering a toll-free number to users, and it has also strengthened its moderation to avoid negative comments.
Source: TikTok