TikTok announced - in a publication yesterday, Monday - that the number of active users of the application has reached one billion per month, and this means that one out of every 7 people on the planet regularly watches videos short on this app.
By comparison, Facebook announced last June that it had 2.9 billion monthly active users, an increase of 7% year on year, but the growth of TikTok is much faster, as new data indicates an increase of 45% in monthly active users since July 2020 when the app had just 289 million users.
Moreover, in July of this year, TikTok became the first non-Facebook app to reach 3 billion downloads globally, according to app analytics firm SensorTower.
The competition posed by TikTok - of Chinese origin - to the Western technology giants is clear. The "Instagram" application owned by Facebook has radically changed its focus, announcing that it is no longer an application for images, and is now heavily promoting the "Reels" feature. ), which is trying to emulate TikTok, and even discussion forums like Reddit are becoming enamored with the idea of short videos.
The fear of TikTok has reached such an extent that Instagram has advised content makers that if they recycle videos that contain the TikTok watermark as posts within Instagram's Rails feature, their content will be less discoverable.
TikTok says its largest markets are in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Southeast Asia, although its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China.
Of course, TikTok has faced severe regulatory threats in recent years. For example, former US President Donald Trump tried to block US business transactions with TikTok. In India, which has a population of 1.36 billion, TikTok has been banned since last year.
Despite all of this, TikTok continues to show impressive growth; Just last month, ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, bought virtual reality device maker Pico, indicating a possible future expansion of the company into the world of virtual reality.
So it's no coincidence that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn his trillion-dollar platform into Metaverse.
After announcing his company's financial results last July, Zuckerberg said, "I wanted to discuss this matter now so that you can see the future we're working towards and how our major initiatives across the company will define that," and added, "What is Metaverse? It's A virtual environment where you can meet with people in digital spaces; you can kind of think of this as an embodied internet that you're in rather than just looking at."
Will Tik Tok turn the tables on Facebook and its sisters?