What is TikTok? The world’s most downloaded social media app
A lot of people nowadays know what TikTok is after the app blew up during lockdown over the course of 2020 and 2021 when everyone was stuck in their homes. However, you could be forgiven for not being quite up-to-date with social media’s latest hot ticket.
Originally called A.me and later Douyin, the app was launched by ByteDance in Beijing, China in September 2016. ByteDance decided to make the move to global markets soon after realizing there was a need to get out there before competitors created their own versions.
This led to the app’s rebranding as TikTok in September 2017 and was later launched outside of China in international markets. By January 2018, it was already Number 1 in several countries including Thailand.
Some of the earliest American celebrities on the app included Jimmy Fallon and Tony Hawk. Soon, the likes of Jessica Alba, Justin Bieber, Will Smith, and Jennifer Lopez joined the fray.
It was after that ByteDance bought musical.ly which was well-known for its comedy and lip-sync videos merging the two app’s video databases together. It’s believed ByteDance did this in order to better market TikTok to young American audiences.
In October 2018, it became the most downloaded app in the United States, and in 2019, it was labeled as the 7th most downloaded mobile app of the decade from 2010 to 2019.
How many people use TikTok?
TikTok is comfortably one of the most popular apps in the world. To date, it has over 2 billion total downloads, according to Statista.
Throughout 2020, it was the most downloaded app across iOS and Andriod.
In the United States alone, TikTok has approximately 65 million monthly active users, the largest region. Second is Indonesia, with 22 million monthly active users.
For as long as Tom can remember, he has understood the reality around him through the tinted glasses of works of fiction, be it books, films, TV shows, or anime. An English graduate, he wrote articles on a wide array of topics for several years, from entertainment and pop culture to history and literature. Before that, he was an educator and a roleplay game writer and developer. It is his deeply-rooted love for performing arts and visual media that led him to become a part of the DC team in 2020.